Self assessment: The fall out

Bit perplexed that in 1300 reads nobody has posted a comment.  I hate blank space so here goes.

Second year for us that we only had about a dozen returns & Ltd Co accounts to do in December/January.  I don't know if we are unusual but as most of our business clients are Ltd Cos with 31 March year ends, November - January has been doubly nasty for us over the years.  After a particulary bad December/January in 2008 I said enough was enough and made several changes to procedures & billing all designed to encourage clients to bring in their information earlier rather than later.

It is clear that most clients want to beat the 31 January deadline but why?  I'd always believed that it was the £100 fine or the increased risk of enquiry but it's not, according to a client with a degree in psychology, it's the simple fact someone has given them a deadline.

In past years we said that we could not guarantee having the work done in time if clients did not give us all we needed by 31 October, so what happened, we received a huge chunk of information in the last few days of October, they did all they could to beat the new deadline.  Trouble is of course that by rushing to do so a significant number only managed 80-90% of what we needed meaning we then had a panic November checking and chasing and estimating CT tax bills, leaving, yet again, December & January to do bulk of returns & accounts.

All of the above has become clear since we changed things, ie I didn't realise it at the time but, by luck our new procedures set a deadline of 3 months after the year end (ie 5 July or 30 June).  Even though I tested my plans with a sample of clients I sat back and waited for the howls of anguish when I imposed the new deadline in April 2008 on all of them, but there was nothing, instead I got an exact replica of the previous year only in the last week of June ie we got over 70% of checklists & accounting info in by the end of June rather than the end of October.

The other threats & encouragements made little difference it was simply the deadline they were interested in.  What was gratifying was how many of the previous winter visitors expressed delight at not having to worry about it all over Summer & Autumn.

Would be interested to know whether others have tried this but two years down the line it's worked wonders for us and meant I do my Christmas shopping during daylight hours!

Thanks for your comment about deadlines - it looks like something worth trying!

We did miss a few returns this year.  I decided dropping the books in on 30 January was just too late!  Especially as we had had a conversation last year about him doing the return online himself!

I did think about an estimated return but there was not enough time to put the figures together and, anyway, I am not sure that would avoid a penalty as there was no good reason for using estimated figures (such as a difficult valuation issue).