TaxCalc Blog

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.

Where prices stay the same

We believe that compliance work that we undertake should rarely result in us having to pass on these costs. We know that other suppliers often cite the increased cost of compliance to justify a blanket price increase but surely your licence fees paid should cover the following year’s development?

Unless there are good reasons to do so, our goal has been to only increase our prices because we’ve added value to our software.

So even though the compliance burden has been higher this year than in others, what with new APIs, forms, calculations and so on, you’ll find that we have decided to hold steady on the price of our Individual and Partnership product.

As such, and as per every year since 2009 (when it was called “Pro”), Individual and Partnership will be priced at just £300 plus VAT.

The same goes for Trust Unlimited, which remains at £150 as per last year. This is also true of Accounts Production Micro, Small and Unlimited (at £99, £249 and £499 respectively) and our VAT and AML products.

So what will be changing?

We will, however, be making a small price adjustment to Corporation Tax Unlimited.

The key reasons are as follows:

1. We have made some substantial improvements to the management and presentation of the corporation tax computation. We believe that we have the best looking computations in the market and something we hope you are proud to present to your clients.
2. We have developed a comprehensive R&D tax credit wizard, which records the enhanced expenditure, helps with rate calculations, makes appropriate entries in the computation and return and calculates any potential amount due to your client.
3. We’ve introduced useful customer sourced improvements, such as a client approval schedule for the CT600 v3 (you’ll note there is nowhere for your client to sign on the new form), improved import from TaxCalc Accounts Production and added more checks and validations to ensure a successful filing (even checking that HMRC’s servers are online and operational).

As such, we feel that a small increase of £25 to Corporation Tax Limited is justified. However, its new price is still only £175.

The other two key price increases (in percentage terms), are to the Dividend Database and the What If? Planner. In each case, they will be going up by £5 each to £40 and £50 respectively.

In the former’s case, our data provider has been steadily increasing the price of the source data each year since we introduced the product. If we’d increased the product in line with this, it would now be retailing for £43. Thankfully, we sell many units of Dividend Database and so are happy to absorb most of the increase.

In the latter’s case, the product will require a substantial rework to take into account significant changes in tax law, such as the taxation of dividends. Whilst you could argue that this could be compliance, products that predict the future receive less immediate computational support from HMRC, so the engine that works out the potential liability actually takes us more effort to make than the main application itself.

Finally, we will be increasing the additional concurrent user charges by a modest £5 a user.

Here’s to a successful 2016!

We continue to believe that TaxCalc remains fantastic value for money and it’s something that our customers certainly tell us so!

In the last five years, we’ve developed an entirely new platform and built an integrated product suite of class leading software. Every release introduces new features that can really make a difference to a practice.

Above all, we have never lost sight of our commitment to delivering the highest standards of customer support. It’s for all of these reasons that we have become the largest privately owned software provider in this market and today support over 5,500 firms of accountants.