TaxCalc Blog

HMRC Making Tax Digital – What You Need To Know

We received a number of emails and calls yesterday and today following a webinar presented by another company in our industry. The webinar purported to be in connection with HMRC’s Making Tax Digital strategy but turned out to be not much more than rouse to sell mobile app development services.

Unfortunately, its content rather unsettled the customers that contacted us, so I’ve written this blog to set out where the industry currently sits with the strategy and how it could affect practitioners and their firms…

We're delighted to announce the official launch of TaxCalc SmartPractice Seminars!

Taking place in four locations across the UK, these unique seminars will be providing the perfect balance between topical tax issues and TaxCalc future developments.

We'll be discussing the new HMRC Digital Tax Accounts, the impact of the new Dividend Tax, Practice Development, TaxCalc Cloud Connect and much more! 

Key reasons to attend:

TaxCalc SmartPractice Seminars 2016

Keeping up with the latest tax announcements in a rapidly evolving digital world can often feel like a job in itself.

Wondering how up to date your own skills and knowledge are? That’s where TaxCalc are here to help. We'll be running four seminars during 2016 to bring you up to speed on everything tax…

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…

Making Tax Digital – Quarterly Updates, Petitions, Debates and Research

I doubt that it will have escaped the reader of this blog that the Government has recently been extolling the virtues of its radical digital agenda. Back in the Autumn statement last December, it dropped something of a bombshell in the form of quarterly updates of accounting information for the self employed and, although rarely mentioned, for landlords too.

Rather than provide explanation as to how this could all work, the detail is still to follow. Indeed, various publications have recently been released by HMRC but they don’t exactly put much meat on the bones. There’s been research, which I’ll discuss later, but (at time of writing) we are still waiting for preliminary consultation, which will be followed by further consultation later this year.

And, of course, consultation generally only focuses upon one thing at a time. So there appears to be separate consultation to be had on quarterly updates, on the alignment of business activity to tax payments, on the penalties regime and so on.

Quite rightly, there has been much hubbub in the media and amongst both the accountancy practice and self employed industries. Again, I doubt it will have escaped you that there was a petition started to challenge “quarterly returns”. Having gained over 100,000 signatures, Her Majesty’s Government was required to debate the issue…

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! ...

HMRC's New APIs – How They Work in TaxCalc 2016

Hi there. I’m Greg Case and I’m TaxCalc’s Head of Product Development. I’ve recently been reviewing HMRC’s progress with the implementation of their new Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and how we’re going to incorporate this into the forthcoming 2016 version of our software.

In a nutshell it will give TaxCalc the ability to gather information that HMRC hold about a taxpayer and, in time, even update it in real time and outside of the tax return itself.

But only if you want it to. To do this, you need to give your TaxCalc software permission to work with HMRC’s APIs. TaxCalc can’t access any information unless you allow it to.

In this article, we’ll look at how it works…

Gathering Customer Feedback

We are now in the second week of January and we are pleased to report that, in Support, we are exceeding expectations with an average wait time of just 26 seconds last week.

I mentioned in my previous article that we listen to our customers, and we really do! Part of our review process for cases involves looking at how many customers would like a feature or change to be implemented, so we rely on customers telling us what they want…