Stay at the top of your game this Self Assessment season

FOUR SMALL CHANGES. ONE BIG DIFFERENCE TO YOUR WELL-BEING

Do you dread the Self Assessment season knowing you’re going to be on your knees by the end of January, feeling totally burnt out?

What if this year was different and you made a few simple lifestyle tweaks that made a massive difference to your energy and focus?

TaxCalc has teamed up with healthy lifestyle expert Rachel McGuinness from Zest Lifestyle to help you boost your energy through January.

This guide is divided into four parts:

1. Sleep Well
2. Eat Smart
3. Move More
4. Chill Out

Just as TaxCalc software makes life easier during this busy time, this guide will help reduce your stress and stay at the top of your game.

HMRC Making Tax Digital Update

It’s been almost two months since we last posted about HMRC’s Making Tax Digital strategy.

Due to matters such as the local elections and the EU Referendum, not an awful lot has happened since then. However, there have been a few matters of note arising…

New Addition to HMRC Government Gateway Security

As part of HMRC’s Making Tax Digital strategy, we have been expecting security improvements to be made to taxpayers’ access to their online accounts via the Government Gateway.

On 29 March 2016, HMRC introduced a new optional layer of security that introduces a mobile phone into the logging in process for Individual taxpayers…

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…

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…

Digital Tax Accounts and Quarterly Reporting

The Government today released a new document about Digital Tax Accounts. Entitled Making Tax Digital, it consolidates information that has been released into the public domain since the March Budget and lays out the roadmap by which HMRC will transform from its current regime to the new digital one.

Having read numerous articles in the press these last few days, many reporters have reiterated the fact that Digital Tax Accounts, both for individuals and businesses, will be the norm by 2020. However, what seems to have slipped somewhat under the radar by a few is the requirement for “most” self employed people and landlords to make quarterly returns from April 2018…

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.