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:

The Digital Tax Account – Public Beta and a New Name

On Tuesday 1 December 2015, HMRC formally launched the public beta of the Digital Tax Account, now renamed the Personal Tax Account (PTA).

The new service, as with all new Government projects, is to be delivered in a piecemeal fashion. In this article, we’ll take a look at what it can do…

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.

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.