Once had a very excited HMRC officer launch an enquiry into directors' / shareholders' personal tax. Straight in with threats of interest penalties, willful omissions, what a major crime had been committed etc. etc. .............................. until I pointed out that 31 March isn't the same as 5 April!
When cash basis might not suit your business
Cash basis probably will not suit you if you:
want to claim interest or bank charges of more than £500 as an expense
run a business that’s more complex, for example you have high levels of stock
need to get finance for your business - a bank could ask to see accounts drawn up using traditional accounting to see what you owe and are due before agreeing a loan
have losses that you want to offset against other taxable income (‘sideways loss relief’)
There is rarely a situation when taxpayers are going to be better off, in terms of total tax paid, by using the cash basis.
Although the 'simplification' is often quoted, in practice there are likely to be large swings in the tax payments for small traders making coping overall more difficult for them.
They could give me a retainer however not sure they would fully appreciate my objectivity. I'm hugely critical of one of their offerings and told them it's the worst program that I've ever used.
Can't answer the Sharepoint query however regarding the data query either locally or on TaxCalc's servers using their CloudConnect offering. We used to do the former, now the latter.
Point I think is really fair with TaxCalc is you don't pay per user, but per concurrent user. Even then you can vary it across the product offerings, e.g. 5 concurrent users for CloudConnect, 3 concurrent for Accounts Production, 2 concurrent for Tax etc. etc.
Ah but you can subscribe to TaxCalc CloudConnect, like we do. This give you the best of both worlds. The database is held in the cloud and the program is held locally.
This results in lightning fast speeds compared to fully cloud based products and access from anywhere.
Once initially set up the program update is amazing, literally clicking a link to accept the update as an admin user. Implementation is about 10-15 seconds. Once the admin user has done that any 'satellite' users are updated fully and automatically the next time they log on.
So the update process is one click. Never have I had to fault fix TaxCalc.
A lot has changed since your 2012 blog post when you were going fully cloud, best to keep an open mind.
Obviously personal choice if people want to continue using IRIS, but maybe reflect how many moans do we see about IRIS v how many do we see about TaxCalc? In fact, from memory, I can only remember a member called 'Wanderer' moaning about one aspect of the TaxCalc offering!
I was a very early adopter for IRIS Accounts Production. Think 'Iris Senior' in the 1980s. Kept it right up to 8 months ago.
Evaluated all the offerings just over a year ago and started to move Accounts Production over to TaxCalc, having used TaxCalc for SA since 1996/1997, up to about seven years ago, and for CT consistently for 20 years.
Now in the second year of TaxCalc for combined Accounts Production & CT and it is a joy to use. The integration & usability is amazing & streets ahead of IRIS, which became slow, clunky & more & more difficult to use over the years. I used to set an hour aside to implement the Iris updates & patches. TaxCalc is a click of a button and as each user logs on it automatically updates their installation as well.
Moved back to TaxCalc for SA this year. Again a joy to use. Additionally TaxCalc pricing is completely transparent.
Really suggest that people invest the time to see what alternatives are on offer.
"The regulator estimated that the bank had washed nearly £300m in criminal funds between 2012 and 2017"
How is that even possible? They only needed to obtain a copy of a passport & a utility bill then complete a tick list & apparently that stops all these money laundering shenanigans.
Yes Richard, it’s really great to have you back with your sage comments (in case you don’t know, yours and Jason's views are the only ones that I respect on this forum – even though we occasionally disagree).
Soon they'll be adopting the same method as another government department I dealt with recently:-
HMG wrote:
As it has been some time since your email you may have had your query resolved through another route, so we are following up to confirm that you still require a response from us and so that your query can be prioritised.
Please note that if we don’t hear back from you, we will assume that your query has already been answered and no further response will be sent.
So basically we've binned all old communications and you'll have to contact us again for anything to be dealt with!
My answers
Once had a very excited HMRC officer launch an enquiry into directors' / shareholders' personal tax. Straight in with threats of interest penalties, willful omissions, what a major crime had been committed etc. etc. .............................. until I pointed out that 31 March isn't the same as 5 April!
Per .gov.uk
There is rarely a situation when taxpayers are going to be better off, in terms of total tax paid, by using the cash basis.
Although the 'simplification' is often quoted, in practice there are likely to be large swings in the tax payments for small traders making coping overall more difficult for them.
https://www.taxcalc.com/cloud-connect-tax-software#Versions
They could give me a retainer however not sure they would fully appreciate my objectivity. I'm hugely critical of one of their offerings and told them it's the worst program that I've ever used.
You can get a 14 day demo of everything, except CloudConnect, here:-
https://www.taxcalc.com/trial
Can't answer the Sharepoint query however regarding the data query either locally or on TaxCalc's servers using their CloudConnect offering. We used to do the former, now the latter.
Point I think is really fair with TaxCalc is you don't pay per user, but per concurrent user. Even then you can vary it across the product offerings, e.g. 5 concurrent users for CloudConnect, 3 concurrent for Accounts Production, 2 concurrent for Tax etc. etc.
Ah but you can subscribe to TaxCalc CloudConnect, like we do. This give you the best of both worlds. The database is held in the cloud and the program is held locally.
This results in lightning fast speeds compared to fully cloud based products and access from anywhere.
Once initially set up the program update is amazing, literally clicking a link to accept the update as an admin user. Implementation is about 10-15 seconds. Once the admin user has done that any 'satellite' users are updated fully and automatically the next time they log on.
So the update process is one click. Never have I had to fault fix TaxCalc.
A lot has changed since your 2012 blog post when you were going fully cloud, best to keep an open mind.
Obviously personal choice if people want to continue using IRIS, but maybe reflect how many moans do we see about IRIS v how many do we see about TaxCalc? In fact, from memory, I can only remember a member called 'Wanderer' moaning about one aspect of the TaxCalc offering!
I was a very early adopter for IRIS Accounts Production. Think 'Iris Senior' in the 1980s. Kept it right up to 8 months ago.
Evaluated all the offerings just over a year ago and started to move Accounts Production over to TaxCalc, having used TaxCalc for SA since 1996/1997, up to about seven years ago, and for CT consistently for 20 years.
Now in the second year of TaxCalc for combined Accounts Production & CT and it is a joy to use. The integration & usability is amazing & streets ahead of IRIS, which became slow, clunky & more & more difficult to use over the years. I used to set an hour aside to implement the Iris updates & patches. TaxCalc is a click of a button and as each user logs on it automatically updates their installation as well.
Moved back to TaxCalc for SA this year. Again a joy to use. Additionally TaxCalc pricing is completely transparent.
Really suggest that people invest the time to see what alternatives are on offer.
Have a look at TaxCalc.
"The regulator estimated that the bank had washed nearly £300m in criminal funds between 2012 and 2017"
How is that even possible? They only needed to obtain a copy of a passport & a utility bill then complete a tick list & apparently that stops all these money laundering shenanigans.
Soon they'll be adopting the same method as another government department I dealt with recently:-
So basically we've binned all old communications and you'll have to contact us again for anything to be dealt with!