Thriving and surviving as business goes digital

The Covid-19 enforced lockdown in March saw firms across the country abruptly move their businesses from being office, to home-based.

For many of those firms that have already embraced the 'Digital Revolution', the transition to home working has been far smoother – and has also come some distinct advantages. Flexible working has resulted in improved productivity and, in many cases, staff morale. Also, firm location and distance is no longer a barrier to serving clients and has resulted in the provision of more responsive advisory services and improved client relationships.

With the lockdown continuing to ease, one TaxCalc customer reflects on the immediate and lasting changes of working from home and going digital.

Holding COVID-19 to Account with Folding@Home and TaxCalc

At TaxCalc we've been working hard to play our part during the COVID-19 pandemic. Different members of the TaxCalc family have been doing projects to try and help the situation for others, such as 3D printing visors or sewing scrubs for the NHS. These projects, however, require machinery or at least some level of skill that not everyone has. Several people, however, have home computers that are sat doing nothing during the workday.

Business as usual, in unusual times.

We're living in very strange and surreal times. Times when we have to self-isolate, where we can no longer go into the office or meet our clients face-to-face. Times when we have to find other ways to communicate with each other and access our systems remotely.

Businesses are being forced to rethink how they work and how to adapt in a very short time frame.

So how can you keep your business running - as well providing your clients with the support they need to keep their businesses running too?

In practice: TaxCalc Document Manager powered by SmartVault

In our connected world, people now expect to work and interact remotely – even when it comes to sharing important documentation. For firms preparing sets of accounts and filing tax returns, the traditional method of sending and receiving hard copy documentation is becoming less attractive: the process takes longer, costs more and takes up valuable storage space. Clients are also simply too busy and are accustomed to viewing documents on-screen and printing only when necessary.

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.

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 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.