MS Money Users - Tracking Taxable Income?

irm

As a basic rate taxpayer, this isn't something I necessarily need to do, but I'm flitting fairly close to the HR tax band for total income due to savings so thought it might be a good idea to try and track my income a little more closely. If I ever get a (meagre) payrise I'd be looking at changing pension contributions to stay under the limits, so this endeavour is probably more for 'fun' than anything too serious.

I already do everything in Microsoft Money (couldn't live without it) so every last transaction from 20+ accounts between myself and my wife is kept bang up to date. Many of these are sole accounts but there's a few joint ones too.

I haven't fiddled with the default categories in Money too much, so in terms of income the only ones regularly used are these three: Salary (net pay); Interest; Tax-exempt Interest.

Tax-exempt Interest is easy enough to track for ISAs, but I was wondering how best to deal with the other two? Almost all of the accounts pay interest net (which to date I've just tracked as "interest"), with just a couple of them showing two transactions (+gross interest, -tax). Is it time to break out the calculator? Do I need to read my payslip in more detail to enter more than just a net amount?

As I said, this is more out of idle curiosity than anything else, but I'm interested to hear how others stay on top of this sort of stuff. Perhaps it's not even something I should be worrying about?

Archi_Bald

If all your taxable interest is paid net of 20% tax, all you need to do is record the net interest as taxable interest. As and if you need to give HMRC your figures, they'll be asking you for the net received, anyway.

If you get paid any taxable interest gross (some NS&I accounts do that), just add another category to your MS Money.

As to your payslip: not sure why you would want to record anything other than net income in MS Money. Unless you want to use MS Money to also track the tax you paid?

irm

Thanks Archi, that's really helpful. :beer:

Archi_Bald wrote: »

As to your payslip: not sure why you would want to record anything other than net income in MS Money. Unless you want to use MS Money to also track the tax you paid?

Doesn't sound like there's any need, so that's great. The simpler the better.

Cheers.