ABRA FlexiBee and MicroNebula

TL;DR ✨

The author was facing the first part of the year-end closing process in the ABRA FlexiBee accounting system.

He had successfully entered (almost) all the necessary documents into the system and was handing the two-week relay over to the accountant so she could complete this annual epic.

From the archive

This article was first published on 2017-01-15. It is also a snapshot of its time, so some details and recommendations may no longer reflect the current situation.

The author was facing the first part of the year-end closing process in the ABRA FlexiBee accounting system.

He had successfully entered (almost) all the necessary documents into the system and was handing the two-week relay over to the accountant so she could complete this annual epic.

While working with ABRA FlexiBee, he encountered several details that genuinely annoyed him, and he offered them as suggestions for improvement.

More specifically:

• When entering invoices (received or issued), he was annoyed that at every step the system complained that certain fields had not been completed—typically the due-date field. This was the first item he recommended improving. It would be much better if the software complained only at the END, before saving, and listed everything that was missing or incorrect. Being warned one item at a time was genuinely irritating. In general, it would be better if the due date were filled in automatically (or predefined) as the date received + 14 days. Fourteen days is standard, and anyone who needs something different can adjust it.

The original invoice-entry screen.

The warning shown when the due date is missing.

The document-posting warning.

• The author still did not understand why ABRA FlexiBee had both an “incoming number” field and a variable symbol field. There might have been some higher purpose, but it seemed unnecessary to him because the incoming number was almost always the same as the variable symbol. He tried searching, but could not find the rationale for this field on the support website.

The incoming-number and variable-symbol fields in practice.

• It would be useful to color-code bank transactions according to a defined filter. They were chaotic enough on their own, and this would at least introduce a semblance of order. For example: if a transaction goes from account number 1 (the author's Fio Bank account) to account number 2 (his KB account), mark all such transactions green, and vice versa. That would be a fantastic feature. Would it ever arrive?
• If a document such as a bank transaction was deleted and one of the selected documents had a link to something else, the system prevented deletion of everything selected. This was especially annoying because there was no filter capable of showing document links. It then became detective work, with hours spent hunting for linked documents. The author considered this a major weakness in ABRA FlexiBee. It could not list the fields causing the problem; it merely complained that a link existed somewhere and refused to delete anything.
• An even better variation on the previous problem appeared when trying to delete an object such as a bank account. The system complained that the field was linked; clicking the link item then showed nothing at all.
• Likewise, ABRA could not delete all selected cash documents. They had to be deleted one by one. It was awful.
• Every item had a scanning function in the attachments section, but the support materials did not explain anywhere how to configure or set it up. That also needed improvement in the future.
• Another suggestion for the future was for ABRA to support OCR during scanning. The author would have liked to take a PDF, upload it, and have ABRA FlexiBee identify the fields and prefill them in, for example, the received-invoice form. Did anyone know how to implement this?
• The truly worst issue was that ABRA FlexiBee COULD NOT automatically turn an advance invoice into a final invoice with the advance deducted and then send it. This was a real nuisance. It was not even possible to select all paid advance invoices and turn them into final invoices with deductions using a single button. This clearly needed improvement.

In general, ABRA FlexiBee was not suitable for someone just starting a business. The reason was that it lacked several small adjustments that would make this possible. Compare it, for example, with the free idoklad service.

🧾 The following features were missing from ABRA FlexiBee

1. Automatically issue an advance invoice from the order form.
2. Provide reminders when an invoice has not been paid.
3. Improve matching so that invoice payments in February are matched with payments made in February, perhaps with some tolerance for late payments.
4. Send invoices automatically to specified email addresses, or send text messages.

The author's team was gradually working on this solution. They believed it filled a gap in ABRA FlexiBee and wanted to address it in the future. The problem was that it was not as attractive on price for a new business as, for example, idoklad.cz. Would ABRA FlexiBee improve this?