National Customer Service Week with the TaxCalc Support Team

A round up from the week team TaxCalc joined in with National Customer Service Week for the first-time.

HMRC Self Assessment APIs – Experiences and Developments

As our practitioner customers will be aware, in the latter half of 2017, we released our implementation of HMRC’s new Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs). This is data that HMRC has already received from different sources which can then be fed into the tax return. This facility has proven to be extremely useful, saving our customers a great deal of time and effort.

10 Top Tips to beat the 31 January Self-Assessment blues

You probably know that the deadline approaching for submitting your Self Assessment tax return is the end of this month. Here are ten tax return tips to help you file your Self Assessment return in time and without stress.

It’s not just being late that can lead to a nasty letter from HMRC or a fine. By using TaxCalc we’ll also help check for errors and fix issues before you file your return meaning you’ll be much less likely to make any mistakes!

Corporation Tax Loss Reform – An update to TaxCalc

Last Friday, HMRC emailed the accountancy practice community to inform that new rules concerning the relief and utilisation of corporate losses had taken effect.

The new rules were part of the legislation put before ministers earlier this year but, due to the General Election in May, were taken out as part of the ‘washing up’ of the original Finance Act – essentially, the passing of enough of the Budget to keep the country going...

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.

January? The best time of year to call TaxCalc Support?

Sounds unlikely? Surely most firms expect to wait a little longer for support from their software suppliers in the run up to the return filing deadline? True, but I’m pleased to say things are different for TaxCalc customers.

Maintaining excellence in Customer Support is as important to us as every other aspect of our business offering. Other providers might identify Support as an easy target for cost-savings. We, on the other hand, invest heavily in our Support team to provide a prompt, and technically-superior service to our customers. For instance, we place great emphasis on answering our Support Line in seconds rather than minutes. I’m exceptionally proud to tell you that our team achieved an average of only 22 seconds to answer our customers during January. Those of you who’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of waiting for 20 minutes and more for other providers to handle your query in the past will appreciate the speediness of this level of response. 

Ramping up – why a rush of new customers can be good news for existing ones

Customers. It is all about customers. Attracting new customers is obviously important for any business, as is offering new products and services that existing customers can buy. However, what matters most is looking after the customers that you already have. Of course, that’s not a new principle but it is one that is easy to lose sight of when things get busy.

Chips and Gravy

So, now you may be wondering why anyone at TaxCalc would be writing a post about chips and gravy. 

Well, we ask our customers if they have a couple of minutes to complete a survey after any remote log in session or email correspondence with us. This gives us an idea of how we are performing in relation to the support that we provide our customers. We also have a similar survey for feedback about the product itself.

We continually review the results and the comments received from these surveys and would like to thank everyone who left the fantastic comments we received throughout January 2016.  However, it seems that we just weren’t specific enough for one customer when we asked for additional comments. They took the opportunity to tell us that they like chips and gravy! ...