What is ANNA Money?
ANNA Stands for Absolutely No Nonsense Admin and it is a banking app designed for small businesses. ANNA seeks to remove all the admin involved with running your own business and gives options in the app to prepare invoices, send payment reminders, track expenses, and remind you about the payment of taxes.
ANNA will in future be able to prepare, submit and pay your vat using the making tax digital gateway. ANNA is also in the process of building API links to the major software suppliers Xero, Quickbooks and Freeagent.
Sign-up
The sign-up process for ANNA is very slick and is all conducted via the chat inside the app. I answered a few questions about my business and uploaded a photo id and a few minutes later my account was opened, and I had my sort code, account number and a virtual debit card to start using for online transactions. It is hard not to be impressed by how easy the sign-up process is, and it compares well to the likes of Starling, Monzo and Revolut. If you have an account with any other Fintech bank you will know what to expect when you open an account with ANNA.
Login
The app is very clean when you login, biometric login can be used if you do not like using a passcode. You are presented with a chat screen when you login to the app and all major actions can be done using this screen including requesting a bank statement, creating an invoice, and adding expenses.
Invoicing
It is very easy to create invoices in ANNA, the first time you do this it guides you through the process using the chat function asking you for an invoice template if you have one or by asking you a series of questions. At the end of this process you will be given the opportunity to ask ANNA to send the invoice or you will be able to send it to the client. I was able to share the invoice that I created via WhatsApp which I thought was a nice feature although you can share through email if that is preferred.
Expenses
Expenses are also just as easy to add into ANNA. I took a photo of a travel expense that I made over the last week and uploaded it via the app. A few moments later I was able to select the type of expense it was and make any corrections to the amounts extracted from the receipt. If you use software like Receipt Bank you will be used to the process of doing this and the process in ANNA is very similar.
Don’t forget reminders
You can set up reminders in ANNA for the payments of VAT, Corporation Tax, Self-Assessment, and the filing of confirmation statements with Companies House. I have not been with the app long enough to check how accurate the reminders are, but it seems a very nice feature to have in the app.
After using the app now for just over a week my impressions are that it is very well designed and effective in making the admin part of running a business very easy. The app is very well designed and easy to use, and the chat function means that it does all the hard work for you like creating invoices and adding expenses. It is not something that I would recommend using if you are a larger business but for a micro business it seems to carve out its niche very well and I am sure that some of our clients would find that it would add value to their business.
We have been working with ANNA on the integration into Xero and our first impressions are that the integration is working well. We are also pleased to report that we are working on further product development with the ANNA team and they have been very responsive to the suggestions that we have so far made. The integration with QuickBooks is also being worked upon and we are very interested to see how well that will work once it is ready to test.
I do not think that ANNA would replace a company’s need to have an accountant but certainly reduce the amount of work that an accountant would need to do for the client.