January can be a nightmare month for small-business accountants. The reason? Battling the looming end-of-month Self Assessment online-filing deadline, of course.
And despite sending email reminders to your small-business clients, appealing for them to send the information you need to complete their Self assessment tax return, they leave it until January. Of course they do. They do every year.
Welcome to sales receipt hell
Then they give you a bag full of dog-eared sales receipts for purchases they want to claim as allowable expenses. It can literally take ages to go through them all and total them all up. You may also be given a pile of receipts or invoices for sales made.
Working your way through everything can take up many hours of your life – and that’s just for one client. That’s time that you’ll never get back. You have to work very long hours every January and you’re left thinking the fee you charge is lower than it should be for all of the work you’ve done.
If you’ve managed to convince your small-business clients to record all of their income, costs and expenses into accounting software as they go, it certainly saves you a lot of time, effort and hassle. But you still have to transfer those figures over to their Self Assessment tax return, which also takes time. If only there was an end-to-end accounting to tax return solution…
Well, soon there will be – and just in time for the 31 January 2024 online filing deadline.
Integrated solution for accountants
Earlier this year, Coconut was bought by the people who own GoSimpleTax. If you don’t already use it, you may have heard about GoSimpleTax (it’s recognised by HMRC).It’s multiple award-winning software that many accountants all over the UK use to save time when completing and filing Self Assessment tax returns for sole traders, freelancers, partnerships, landlords, expats and others.
Come December 2023, GoSimpleTax will be fully integrated with Coconut, providing accountants like you with a super convenient time- and cost-saving accounting to tax return-filing solution that you can use to give your clients with a superior service, whether they’re sole traders, freelancers, members of ordinary business partnerships, landlords, expats, company director or someone else who needs to declare taxable income via Self Assessment. GoSimpleTax could make your life much easier and save you lots of time, which means you can process Self Assessment tax returns quicker and in greater volume, so you boost your own income.
