Self assessment season: What worked and what didn't work
Lucy Cohen reviews the successes and failures of the most taxing month of the year and what can be improved for the next January season.
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I would have thought daily reminders would prove counter productive as while some might just sign it to get you off their backs, normal people would just get annoyed and tune them out. Interesting to hear otherwise.
When does the deadline kick in. Last year I filed 3 minutes after the midnight deadline for a client and no fine was issued by HMRC.
This year I had a client who had not responded to my e-mails, finally replying after 11pm on deadline day. I did get her return in on time.
It also depends how sick you are. All our technical staff have the ability to work from home so, whilst they might not feel like a trek into the office and coughing and spluttering everywhere, rather than take a day or two off sick, they carry on working. Obviously, if it's a more serious condition then it's off sick but for a cough or cold we can offer that flexibility.
On the subject on e-signing, we use Adobe sign I noticed this year for some reason we had an unusual amount of unsigned returns, it turns out many of them had been sitting in the clients Spam, now we make sure we tell the client - check the spam
The other useful addition this year was the Adobe Sign App - even signatures in person can now be done electronically, looks very professional too as we use a phone with a stylus
I'm fed up of AdobeSign now, I'll look around (eg: DocuSign) next time renewal comes up. I've been using them since 2012, and the price has gone up a huge amount, at the same time as the level of features have deteriorated.
I used to be able to buy it fully featured for a single user, perhaps about £30 (now over £100 for their basic package). Most of the good features (eg: remembering email addresses from over a year ago) have been removed and put on on the version that costs £500+
I can only look on with disbelieving envy at TR completion rate of 99% by Christmas. On 2 January 2020, my office had completed 61%. I think we are victims of our own past success in meeting deadlines - almost regardless of client behaviour. Despite all the usual prompts and reminders, too many clients, despite their apologies, just assume that we will be able to meet the deadline almost whenever they come up with the goods. Will it take a massive failure one year due to the sheer January numbers to change this? I should say that the 39% "to do" in January is a little misleading, in that we have a lot of large partnerships and, in many cases, we had most of the individual partners' info but couldn't complete and file their personal returns until the partnership TR was finalised. Even so, I reckon 25% of returns had to be done "from scratch" in January. I love February!
Dont understand the overtime "wont work/cant work" argument - its one month of the year. We live in a changing world that requires us to adapt - like Darwin said - if we dont, we die!
I do understand your point & when I was younger I worked all the overtime offered, however I now work the hours I do because of caring for elderly relative & disabled son, I can't work outside these hours because of this & I know I am not alone.
I moved to Taxcalc this year and gained a signing service for the first time - it proved very effective for me with a quick turnaround and also very positive feedback so it is good particularly as once they sign the system tells me and I just file no need for the client to do anything else.
Alternatively just use the word no! I had been chasing a client for some time to get information in, with just over a week to go still hadn't received anything so duly phoned client and told him sorry but we wouldn't be able to file his tax return and he can expect a £100 filing penalty. He accepted it was his fault and also didn't turn up on 30th or 31st expecting us to drop everything for him. Our staff all left at their normal times on 31st January. Sorry but I don't understand the mentality of staying after hours on this day; everyone knows 31st is the deadline so why should they expect us to be in the office or on call till late at night.
Well I can only envy the 99% success rate - I filed 86% of ours in January ! Do I win a prize.
To be serious this arose due to exceptional circumstances, eg long term staff illness, family bereavements within my small number of staff, that just kept pushing this work back until I had no option to concentrate totally on that.
So best laid plans to avoid repeating the last 21 years of SA January's ended up with being the worst ever.