Knowledge Base

What's new?

TaxCalc - September 2020

We know how important it is for you to be at your best - especially during these unprecedented times. Which is why continual, incremental improvement is a core agenda here at TaxCalc.

This release focuses on improving the presentation and professionalism of your client-facing documents and provides you with greater control, efficiency and flexibility across our product range.

Catch up on the major updates below – including significant enhancements to TaxCalc Document Manager, powered by SmartVault.
For the full story check out our release notes.

Don’t forget, the moment you hit update, your software upgrades seamlessly in the background, with no downtime. Trust TaxCalc to keep you at peak performance.

Highlights

  • Create and link clients in Document Manager New for September
  • Control access to your SmartVault client accounts and easily find out which clients have been enabled New for September
  • Personalise your full financial statements
  • New advanced rounding rules
  • Send documents to Document Manager from any TaxCalc module
  • Update multiple jobs and tasks at once
  • New partnership business summary for SA800s

Improvements

  • Accounts Production
  • Document Manager
  • Tax Return Production
  • Practice Manager
  • eSign Centre
  • Time

Accounts Production

Accounts Production updates

Personalise your reports

In business, branding helps you stand out and communicates your professionalism. With our newly-introduced personalisation feature, you can now add your firm's logo to the cover page of full financial statements – and even co-brand it with your client’s logo too. Simply:

  • Add a logo to your firm’s details in Admin Centre.
  • Add a logo to a client/business record within Practice Manager.

Add manual page breaks in financial statements

At times, adding a manual page break makes sense and gives you more control over the presentation of notes and narrative reports. Now all you have to do is go to Edit Notes in the menu and select the relevant note to add page breaks as necessary. A section heading with the text ‘continued’ will show where the content continues onto another page.

Use advanced rounding

When producing accounts for your more complex clients, rounding differences may be more likely to occur. To avoid fiddly rounding corrections, save you time and provide you with greater flexibility, we’ve created an advanced rounding rules option for clearly applying advanced rounding rules in a multitude of situations. Learn more here.

Change order of relationships on the face of the accounts

An additional facility is now available which lets you customise the order of relationships within the Officers/Partners pages, allowing you to produce more accurate representations of individuals’ status within a client business and tailor the list to the client’s specific requirements.

Document Manager
powered by SmartVault

Send documents to Document Manager
directly from any TaxCalc module

Now, when sharing and saving documents to your Document Manager portal, instead of hitting Print PDF for each document you want to send, you can now choose and send multiple documents for the same client at once. All you have to do is select Send to Document Manager in the Check and Finish menu. Available in all TaxCalc modules, this new facility will dramatically improve your efficiency.

Updated HMRC Pre-populations APIs

Create and link clients in Document Manager without leaving TaxCalc New for September

Clients you’ve created in Practice Manager can now be connected to clients in Document Manager. Connecting clients creates a secure connection, optimises your integrated workflow, minimises potential for duplicate client setup, simplifies saving documents, increases your Practice's efficiency and adds value to your clients by enabling quick and easy access to key documents. It also simplifies the onboarding process for new clients, reducing data entry and any duplication of effort.

This new integration offers fast and simple configuration as and when you need. No need to stop what you are doing to check configuration and find hidden away admin screens.

  • Create Practice Manager clients in Document Manager so documents can be stored and/or shared with the client
  • Link newly-created or existing Practice Manager clients to Document Manager
  • Dynamically create clients and authorise users, as needed, when sending documents to Document Manager.

Stay in complete control of users and data New for September

If, in the past, you or your staff accessed multiple SmartVault client accounts using one email address, you may have run the risk of uploading the wrong documentation to the wrong client. Now, you can set permissions to configure user account authorisation and control who accesses and sends data to keep data safe. As the admin user you can also keep a tight rein on access to specific SmartVault accounts by giving authority to specific users.

Get a clearer picture of your clients New for September

Now you can view, manage and report on your clients in Document Manager. Simply run a report to display those clients that have been enabled in Document Manager and those that haven’t.

Tax Return Production

Gain greater clarity for partnership
tax return information

You ask, we answer. Many of our customers have been requesting a clearer way to show partnership information in Tax Return Production. So we’ve introduced a new business summary for SA800s which provides a clear, concise, summarised view of partnership information.

Adjusted for profit computations for partnerships

Keep up to date with your compliance

HMRC issued an update to their Specials and Exclusions document in June, which details the scenarios when online filing is not available or workarounds are required due to shortfalls in its systems. These new and amended items have been included in the software to keep you informed and supply the relevant information for any required ‘Reasonable Excuse Claims’.

Fetch data from HMRC faster

As part of our ongoing maintenance programme, we’ve updated the ‘fetch’ facility for pulling data from HMRC, implementing HMRC changes and performance improvements, saving you more time.

Practice Manager

Update multiple jobs and tasks in Work Management

A new Bulk Update tool is now available in Work Management that allows you to update multiple selected Jobs and Tasks in one go. Say for example, a situation arises that effects a number of tasks or jobs, such as a staff member going on holiday and you have to reassign their workload (in this instance over 100 tasks or jobs.)

Using the Bulk Update tool, you would simply update all Job/Task Statuses, Assignees and Work Item Statuses at once, instead of manually updating each one individually. It’s another simple improvement that will boost your efficiency and productivity.

eSign Centre

Manage recipient information

We’ve given you more flexibility to manage and edit recipient and user details for digital envelopes within the recipient table. So now you can edit and add email addresses to multiple recipients in an envelope rather than manually doing so one recipient at a time.

Print envelope history

Not only can you view your envelope history, now you can encrypt the document, print and save it too in a click.

Time

TaxCalc Time updates

Gain better visibility of notes, so you can itemise work accurately when invoicing

The improved WIP Overview and Time Analysis screens now show notes made against time logs so you can easily see any notes that have been added to a time log without having to open each log individually to check any notes.

This makes it easier to drill down and get a pin-sharp picture of time and resource spent, saving you time analysing productivity and billable hours which can be included in printed reports or exported data.

Other enhancements complementing this change are:

  • Expand or collapse all data on screen – with the right-hand click of a mouse.
  • See exact time billed in client time logs – including time that’s been spent on billable activity but which isn’t strictly associated to specific tasks or jobs.
  • Add and remove columns on the WIP Overview and Time Analysis screens – giving you the flexibility to choose what data you want to view on screen and filter the detail for inclusion in printed reports and exported data.
  • Mark all records as billed on one screen – for easier administration, even if certain records aren’t linked to a specific job or task but are still billable.
  • View, print and export time data per screen – now you have the flexibility to expand screens to show the detail on a time log and choose whether to print/export details per screen.

Continuous improvements

At TaxCalc we make continuous improvements and always look to make sure you get the very best experience out of our products.

See the full release notes

You can also find guides, videos and other supporting information on all our products at www.taxcalc.com.

View release Notes