TaxCalc to be TaxAssist’s accountancy software partner

The multi award-winning franchisor, TaxAssist Accountants has appointed TaxCalc as its new software partner.

TaxCalc will provide TaxAssist’s 200+ franchised accountancy firms with a wide portfolio of products, including final accounts production, tax, practice management and Company Secretarial packages, running on its CloudConnect platform.

Right Said FRED 67. Or not?

We always try to share information and insights to support your life in practice. In this case, it’s the curious case of additional disclosures required by Micro-Entities (FRS 105)

Until recently, it hasn’t been necessary for accountants to provide much in the way of notes to Micro-Entity accounts. But that’s now changed.

HMRC 2016/17 calculation errors and Exclusions - Update

EVERYONE MAKES MISTAKES – EVEN HMRC!

But don’t worry. The fix is on its way.

You may already know that HMRC has made a number of changes to the Personal Savings and Dividend Tax Reform, which became effective from 6^th April this year. You’ll also probably know by now that errors were made in the calculation of tax liabilities.

It’s meant that those affected are unable to electronically submit Tax Returns (if an error registers it’s called an Exclusion). Instead they have to file a paper Return, providing at the same time a ‘reasonable excuse’ form. This has proven highly inconvenient and is a potential problem that’s common to users of all brands of tax software.

But fear no more. At TaxCalc we’ve been working closely with HMRC to remedy the situation quickly.

CloudConnect: Katie Hewitt discovers the cloud without compromise

These days, practices expect their tax and accounting software to enable them to operate freely in the same way that many other cloud-based applications would allow. But for users of certain solutions, the experience of processing tax and accounts remotely has fallen far short of expectations. Losing data when internet connections fail; poor security and back-up; incompatibility between desktop and cloud software; issues with iXBRL tagging – these are just some of the issues raised and reported in the accounting press.

TaxCalc CloudConnect at Accountex

TaxCalc recently showcased its latest development, TaxCalc CloudConnect. The service connects your desktop software to a cloud database, which we store and back up for you.

Here's our Commercial Director, Steve Checkley, discussing the service with François Badenhort of AccountingWeb.

Price Changes for Practices from 1 March 2016

There is an old saying that the only two things that you can rely upon in life are death and taxes. If you use software to run your practice, you can probably add price increases to that as well.

However, here at TaxCalc, we don’t take the usual industry line of raising prices by an arbitrary percentage every year. We’re different.

So different, in fact, that after five years of holding prices steady, it was only last year that we finally updated our catalogue and made some modest but necessary adjustments to a handful of our products. At the same time, we introduced an Early Renewal Discount, which for many customers actually rendered these increases moot and rewarded loyalty.

This year, we’re again taking an approach to price increases that is different to the industry…

The Digital Tax Account Explained

Back in the March Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced that the tax return would be replaced by a Digital Tax Account by the end of this parliament. As is often the case with Government policy, such broad statements don’t have any immediate substance to them apart from a few broad concepts.

Over the six months that have followed, HMRC have been beavering away at working out what a Digital Tax Account should look like and how it should work. We have been fortunate to be part of this and have helped to shape this development.

Bit by bit, the picture of how the Digital Tax Account will work has become increasingly more clear and now we can finally begin to explain how some of this will work.

Windows XP and Security

We recently made the announcement that we would be withdrawing formal support for Microsoft Windows XP on 1 March 2016.

Unsurprisingly, we received a small amount of correspondence from customers on this. As an operating system that will, by next March, have seen some 15 years of service, a handful found our announcement to be somewhat of a blow. Others, however, were more philosophical and accepting that this was an inevitability, especially since Microsoft themselves retired the operating system in April of last year.

Since then, Microsoft haven’t been providing security or other critical updates. This has had a knock on effect with the number of customers using the operating system and, indeed, we’ve seen a rapid reduction in the number of installations running on Windows XP.