Can anyone recommend a tax calc website/spreadsheet?

C_Mababejive

Have searched but cannot find a source which will be preloaded with various allowances/rules for each tax year and allows input of various input sources eg savings int,dividends,paye earning etc etc... Also i think i read that you can nominate order of taxation to reduce tax ??

thanks

Pennywise

The taxpert one is probably the most comprehensive and most likely to be accurate as it's written by Tim Good, a highly regarded tax specialist.

https://www.absolutetax.co.uk/products/absolute-taxpert-apps

polymaff

Most accountants are asking the same question as the professional software providers scramble to keep up with HMRC's inept and unstable specifications.

I agree that Tim has his head screwed on more than the others as he tends to also look at the legislation - rather than the hopeless course described above.

You can't reorder the order of assessment to income tax, by the way, only the allocation of non-hypothecated reliefs and allowances. I haven't looked at Tim's latest offering. Does it offer this feature, do it automatically or not at all, Pennywise?

Some of those that do offer this don't seem to have got it quite right yet.

Pennywise

polymaff wrote: »

You can't reorder the order of assessment to income tax, by the way, only the allocation of non-hypothecated reliefs and allowances. I haven't looked at Tim's latest offering. Does it offer this feature, do it automatically or not at all, Pennywise?

They claim it works out the best order automatically, but as far as I know, there's no way to manually change the order applied.

C_Mababejive

thanks all i was hoping for a freebie,, maybe i can knock one up myself. I just need to have a good read and work out how paye income,savings int, and dividend inc all feed into the mix.

polymaff

C_Mababejive wrote: »

thanks all i was hoping for a freebie,, maybe i can knock one up myself. I just need to have a good read and work out how paye income,savings int, and dividend inc all feed into the mix.

Give it a go! The assessment part is, despite the extra complexities introduced in recent years, still reasonably structured*. HMRC should be ashamed of their inability to complete this task for 2016/17 - let alone for 2017/18. The harder part is the optimisation of the distribution of non-hypothecated reliefs and allowances.

*at one end of "structured", relatively few procedures are required to process all of the possible combinations of taxable income; in the mid-ground one has to include more and more "ifs and buts" to handle special cases; at the extreme one has to write an individual procedure for each possible combination of taxable income.

And that's all made worse if the original specification is wrong! We - including HMRC - know that they are not on top of the assessment process; nobody, I believe, fully understands the unknown knowns of the optimisation process. When the latter is true, a common approach is to work out all possible combinations and so implement the process - the "brute force" method. There's an obvious disadvantage to this method, but it should be more likely to throw up the right result !!

C_Mababejive

Thanks Poly,,well you would have thought that HMRC would have put some self calc tools on their own website other than the current pathetic offering considering it is they who hope to be paid and it is they who pillory people for late/no pays when a good number of those people have no or little clue as to what is going on..

00ec25

C_Mababejive wrote: »

thanks all i was hoping for a freebie,, maybe i can knock one up myself. I just need to have a good read and work out how paye income,savings int, and dividend inc all feed into the mix.

very possible to do yourself

I have my own spsheet version to play what ifs on when discussing options with clients. However, being a spsheet it is rather labour intensive to use and maintain...

polymaff

C_Mababejive wrote: »

Thanks Poly,,well you would have thought that HMRC would have put some self calc tools on their own website other than the current pathetic offering considering it is they who hope to be paid and it is they who pillory people for late/no pays when a good number of those people have no or little clue as to what is going on..

To what end if they still don't have it right? They'd only give more spurious credibility to their efforts. The real joke is SA110 where they admit SA110 may give the wrong results due to faulty optimisation !!

Just for my own mental exercise, as now retired, I still maintain an Excel spreadsheet covering the bulk of the assessment process, and have, for the last few years also written a program to further implement the assessment process and to then optimise the non-hypothecateds using a brute force approach. This can process all five classes of taxable income and can process the typical 3-class case in about one fifth of a second - a 5-case one in about 5 seconds. When you consider how many tax assessments have to be processed to get that needle-in-a-haystack, I'm (almost) satisfied !

C_Mababejive

Me being foolish i thought it would be so simple? Why isnt it? I dont have any complex products or situations. All i have is paye income,savings and some divis...

Pennywise

C_Mababejive wrote: »

Me being foolish i thought it would be so simple? Why isnt it? I dont have any complex products or situations. All i have is paye income,savings and some divis...

Which is why there are few, if any, online calculators. I'm an accountant (qualified 30+ years ago) and always used to write my own spreadsheets for forecasting/planning clients' tax, but I gave up a couple of years ago and now buy the Taxpert app instead. I spent hours and hours trying to make a spreadsheet but found it completely impossible - if I can't do one, having 30+ years of experience in personal tax and having always managed to create my own in previous years, I think it highlights the complexity, made worse when you can't put any faith in HMRC's examples on their website, some of which have been proved error-ridden.