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All of our tax staff can work from home and are supplied with a laptop. Sometimes they feel to ill for a long commute but can roll out of bed and continue to deal with emails and Returns at their own pace. If anything comes into the office that needs urgent attention it can be scanned to a shared folder that they can access. This also works for public transport disruption and the bad weather we had last week. I left the office early on Wednesday and first day back today but I kept on working. To us it's the way forward.
Just a tip - if you give people a deadline the majority will work to that, and so, no matter how many times you chase them, if you tell them that the tax return deadline is 31 January, a significant number will take that as permission to bring in their stuff in January.
Like many firms, we used to tell clients that our deadline was 31 October and that, if they missed it, we couldn't guarantee getting the return done by 31 Jan. So perhaps 70% of clients brought their info to us in the latter half of October.
So, ten years ago we just told them in April, when we sent out checklists etc, that our deadline for the info was 5 July and, guess what, 70% got the stuff in by 5 July. Ten years on that's over 80%.
We bolstered this with a threat of a sliding scale of extra charges if they missed our deadline rising to +100% if after 1 December but I've hardly ever had to impose this because clients are good at asking for an extra week or two and any who would have left it till after 1 December are no longer clients, someone else can put up with them.
Personally, I think sending out the first letter in April is too soon. Most folks won't have all their stuff and so your letter goes 'in the pile' and gets forgotten. I write in early June, by which time most clients will have all their stuff and so can reply straight away.
Sending monthly reminders from April will make them into some sort of paper/electronic 'white noise'. I just do two reminders, one at the end of September and another in the first week of January. Seems to work well and we had just two O/S on 31 January from over 1,000!
All the reminders in the world won't stop those recalcitrant clients from delivering their records in January, so I am past worrying about it. If the stuff arrives I deal with it. If it's late I deal with it then.
What does concern me is that even if 10.39m returns did go in by the deadline it still means that 900,000 didn't. I hope those people don't qualify for MTD returns!