First TaxCalc SmartPractice Seminar goes down a storm!

Friday 24^th June 2016 saw the first TaxCalc SmartPractice Seminar take place at The Aviator Hotel, Farnborough.

The feedback from the seminar has been outstanding with over 90% confirming they would attend again in 2017 and over 85% would recommend the SmartPractice to other practitioners.

Protecting Yourself from Phishing Scams

In something of an irony (considering who’s received it), a phishing email beat my spam filter last night and landed in my personal inbox. Purporting to come from HMRC, I apparently have a VAT tax refund waiting for me and need to follow the link to fill out a form to claim it. What excitement for a Thursday evening!

I think that everyone will agree with me that this is really quite a suspicious looking email. However, looking today at the kinds of emails TaxCalc generally receives from HMRC, especially with regard to VAT and VAT MOSS, even official emails from HMRC can appear to be quite generic.

For example, VAT return reminders are addressed to Sir or Madam and VAT MOSS emails to just “VAT MOSS user”. Whilst said emails may quote the name of the company and our VAT number, these can easily be found on our website. 

The email prompted me to think about how we can stay safe with phishing scams.

TaxCalc Cloud Connect – Our approach to Cloud security

At Accountex in May of this year, we announced a new service for our practice customers called TaxCalc Cloud Connect. We're working on it right now and as its name might suggest, it will enable our software to connect to a database in the Cloud, rather than one found on a local computer or network server.

It’s actually a really big project for us. Unlike most of our releases, it doesn’t just touch on the software (which has been turbocharged to deal with latency caused by the Internet) but has required us to build a lot of supporting infrastructure, not just in physical assets such as servers, but in our website too.

Also, for the first time, we’ll be looking after your firm’s data. With this comes great responsibility and so we have sought to find a security model that provides peace of mind whilst not getting in the way.

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.