We’ve
recently completed a project which involved replacing all of our old
Windows 7 computers with shiny, new Linux machines. There were a few
small hiccups along the way, but it went fairly smoothly.
It is quite common for companies
to pay their staff earlier at Christmas time. This is nice for employees, but it
can have a nasty side-effect on workers who receive Universal Credit payments. HMRC
has issued some new guidance, aimed at preventing this problem.
I read an article in the Autumn 2019 issue of Accounting Practice about the experience of digital taxation in Australia, and the fact that it has introduced various initiatives ahead of the UK. For anyone interested in the future impact of digital taxation in the UK, this article has some interesting predictions.
The company behind AccountingWEB, a popular website for accountants, has completed its 2019 survey which assessed the views of people who use accounting software. I’m very pleased to say that The Payroll Site, again, received the highest ratings in the Payroll Software category.
Facebook has come under considerable criticism recently for the way it processes and protects personal data. One of the lesser known issues with Facebook is the way it tracks people who use the world wide web, but who don’t use Facebook. If your website has a Like button on it, you could be complicit in this.
A report about Universal Credit,
published last week, highlights how an employer’s choice of pay dates can still
have unintended consequences for the staff. The report, from the Child Poverty
Action Group (CPAG), states that, “The strict system of monthly assessment
of earnings can cause a host of problems as months do not all include the same
number of paydays”.
Passwords have two main purposes: (1) to make it easy for an authorised person to log on to the system and (2) to make it hard for an unauthorised person to gain access to your account. If the password isn’t written down or stored in a password manager, a good password needs to be easy to remember (to meet the first purpose) and hard to guess (to meet the second purpose). A lot of passwords are good for one of these purposes but not the other and it is important to keep this in mind when choosing a password.
VAT is being ‘made digital’ this year and HMRC plans to give income tax and corporation tax the same treatment in the future. But what does it mean to make a tax digital?
When Real Time Information was first introduced, one of the surprising limitations was that, if employers didn’t send details of all wage payments within two weeks of the end of the tax year, HMRC would start automatically rejecting them. HMRC has now confirmed that this is going to change in April 2019.