Ember Tax & Accounting

Probably great if you’re really experienced in managing your accounts absolutely terrible if you are starting your first business. Firstly I’m immensely shocked and surprised that the customer support team at Ember think it’s appropriate or ok to shame customers for struggling with understanding the accounts filing process and making mistakes. Their response towards me literally moved me to tears. It was my company’s first year in business and I made a lot more money than I expected, this is an achievement I’m extremely proud of and managing the accounts side of things has been a difficult learning curve that Ember and the staff were supposed to be helping me with. I’ve struggled using the tool and the support has been demoralising in more ways than one. To get judgement and shame for making mistakes is abhorrent and unacceptable in my opinion. I have since found an accountant who has been a great help. When I expressed concerns about my experience to someone I was told that I shouldn’t be doing this if I don’t even know certain accounting jargon phrases. I was astonished that this was the response instead of empowering me to get better at managing my accounts I was discouraged so violently. I doubt this even matters to the team as no one at Ember seems receptive to improving but it’s worth a try if I can warn other start up founders and new business owners. They will make you feel small, diminish your efforts, use confusing jargon and intimidate you to try and get you to use their accounting service which I used and still ended up with £9k extra added to my tax bill. They put this down to me filling out the questionnaire wrong which I can take responsibility for however if they aren’t supporting me in catching mistakes I’m better off not working with them, that’s why I would want to use their service. Overall, horrendous experience I deeply regret working with Ember and giving them my hard earned money. The violent disrespect and attitude from customer service genuinely shocked me, HMRC is intimidating enough I need someone on my side and Ember are defo not on your side. Again a bit of compassion and genuine support goes an awful long way as going into business for yourself is a scary and extremely difficult experience and is a path littered with hardship and pitfalls. Judging, shaming and looking down on the customers who may be struggling but ultimately drive your business forward doesn’t seem like an awfully effective business plan to me. I can’t i

Odd that all 5 star reviews are quite short and from the same time period. Having used this app and their actual accounting services. First off the the app should be much better. It’s slow. Using Amazon AWS and clearly they are not putting enough resources into the platform on the AWS side to reduce costs but making everything sluggish and slow. App hangs a lot. It takes me a dozen attempts to file my VAT. Reviewing transactions is buggy and sometimes you’re not sure what has been reviewed or not because it’s all very slow. Used the actual accountancy services to file my company accounts. We have our own cfo now who looked at what was filed and stated that they had indeed files our accounts and companies house accounts incorrectly. On top of this they have increased their monthly fees so much that it simply isn’t a cost effective alternative. Simply a costly buggy app with an accounting team that doesn’t know what it’s doing. Having developed apps and set up companies myself. I get the impression a bunch of young, relatively inexperienced accountants thought they could rock the accounting world with an app, do it on the cheap and bit off more than they could chew.

I would imagine the other reviews are just written by employees, no one in their right mind would use this for a serious bookkeeping job - Sole Trader or Not. This is a predatory company that is selling half-baked software which runs slow like it’s in a web browser. Don’t dare upload attachments like receipts or invoices, you will lose access to everything and it will be held ransom until you pay This app also is great if you already have an actual accountant and you just want to waste your own time pretending to be an accountant too. This would also be good for tracking your children’s expenses via Open Banking or something simple like that Otherwise, stay away and save yourself the hassle - just get yourself an actual accountant that will save you more than you spend

Very disappointed as had high hopes. App hangs on pages forever. Sometimes chat button doesn’t work and also the text is unreadable because is cut off. Constant app problems which is the main reason for me to switch, now I regret it

Constant App issues unfortunately which lets the service down

This app has saved me!!!

Really really pleased with Ember’s offering. Such a wide variety of prices out there for a lot of the same services. Ember has really impressed me with its simplicity and the really helpful team behind it. If you are an aspiring freelancer or just starting out in a business of your own - look no further.

I started using Ember about 2 weeks ago, my previous accountants were very expensive and not as dedicated. I moved from an old school type of accountancy to a lean and agile company. Ember is great from a human point of view, as you are assigned an accountant who cares about your finances and is very knowledgable. Moreover, from a technical point of view, they offer an app that allows a lot of automation in the usual accounting tasks. You can also connect most bank accounts to interact with the app, like Revolut, Starling or Monzo and that makes the difference. I used to use a bank which transfers took days to process. Ember is a new company which offers very competitive pricing for the quality it offers, most things are done using Software and that really makes the difference as you see your balance sheets updating in real-time. I'm very happy to be part of their journey and I can only strongly recommend them to any limited company.

Fantastic help for subcontractors, saves a lot of time and hassle - thank you!

Superb app to manage my finances. Really user-friendly! Highly recommend.