For those of us that work in personal tax, 31 January is an important deadline. If you did not realise that, the penalty notices for filing your tax return late will be arriving shortly.

In the last week of January there will have been about 2 million personal tax returns filed online with HMRC. That’s a lot of computing capacity. We were not filing much after 5PM on 31 January so I do not know if HMRC’s computers coped with the rush as midnight approached. We were part of that at one time but no longer!

I spent much of the day running reports and checking we hadn’t missed anyone while the team made sure the last few returns were completed and filed, dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s.

This was in spite of our servers deciding that 31 January was a good day to start playing up, running slow and disconnecting some offices. We had enough slack and so we managed. As has become customary, I was last man standing, tidying up loose ends which, by the way included filling the paper towel dispenser in the gents (I get all the plum jobs).

This weekend will be a rest with our now traditional New Return Year Day dinner of roast chicken with all the trimmings. Not quite sure how that tradition started but Helen and I really look forward to it. Lazy day and roast chicken.

Then om Monday, we get back to work but now that tax return season is out of the way, it will be continuing to work on our systems and looking to the future and progressing our 10 year plan (we are 6 months into it), so we know where we are going and we have strategies in place and milestones. You see, we only tell people to do what we do ourselves and have experienced in practice.

So, Happy New Tax Return Year. I hope you have a penalty free time.

Alan

PS If you want to know how we go about setting our 10 year plan, and are interested in doing the same, just message me and we can arrange a meeting (F2F or skype) to discuss.

First on my Agenda

Well, this is my first day back in harness after the start of the new Tax Return Year. I can now start to think about the year ahead.

Christmas dinner – I was attending the BNI Highland weekly meeting a coupe, of weeks ago. This is held at the rather nice Kingsmills Hotel in Inverness at 7am every Thursday morning. There are currently 48 members and it is one of the most active and successful chambers in the whole UK (Number 2 out of 450ish in the monthly rankings for December). The Kingsmills are also members and so at a meeting in January made a pitch about booking Christmas Dinners, whether for staff or family, at Christmas or in the run up to it. So, it’s never too early to start. It certainly made an impression.

Conferences – I attend 3 tax conferences each year (Cambridge, Warwick and Dunblane). These have been a part of my annual routine for 28 years and they are a lot more interesting than you think. Apart from anything else I do other things while I am away so they are a bit of a busman’s holiday.

Marketing – We need to schedule reviews of our marketing throughout the year. We have made some changes towards the end of 2019 and we also need to get on with the build of the new website with the assistance of Abbie McCahill at Adder Business Services in Tore.

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