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!

Pre-population of Self Assessment Tax Returns Using HMRC APIs

As you may have heard in recent announcements, such as the one from our CEO Tracy Ebdon Poole Making Tax Digital for Business has been delayed. However, the ability for information to be automatically populated in a Self Assessment tax return is still pressing on. 

Having first written about this in early 2016, we thought it was time to update our customers as to the progress of this.

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. 

Making Tax Digital - Consultation Documents

HMRC have now published their consultation documents on the Making Tax Digital (MTD) strategy. Covering six separate documents and totalling 243 pages, together they set out HMRC’s vision for the future for the UK’s tax system.

For some time now, we’ve been taking time to inform our customers of the key concepts behind Making Tax Digital: Digital Tax Accounts, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Quarterly Updates. The consultations not only help explain these plans but introduce some new ideas not previously imagined.

We’ve dissected the first of the six documents and here are our high-level findings…

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…