Self Assessment software advice

RTodd_2

Hello one and all,

I'm a self-employed individual, who has income from a rental property and I've also recently had to take a part time PAYE employment. I've been doing my tax returns for nearly 20 years by myself but it's starting to get more and more complicated to keep tabs on what tax I've already paid & what I need to save.

The HMRC has a list of software and I've been looking at a bunch of them and other options but none seems to quite cover everything. They either submit property income but not employment or the other way around.

So far I've looked at:

FreeAgent: which I think could be good but it doesn't have the rental income (SA105) section. Is there a workaround that anyone knows about?

Quickbooks (Self Employed): great receipt scanning capabilities but no flexibility for employed income and rental either.... unless I need small businesses or another of their packages?

GoSimpleTax: Seemed clunky as hell and didn't have all the different options.

What have I missed - is there ANYTHING out there? Particularly ones with iPhone apps as I work away and this would be a great way to keep on top of things.

Or do I want the moon on a stick????? :laugh:

badmemory

If you have been filing your own self assessment for 20 years then I think that you must be overthinking this.


Are you earning enough PAYE to actually pay tax on the income? If you are then just go through the year saving enough to pay tax on every penny of your self employed earnings & watch out for the 40% threshhold. When you come to file your self assessment there is a section where you put your P60 figures of gross income & tax paid.

00ec25

there is no single software solution which will meet your consolidated needs that you can sensibly buy as a single taxpayer.

We use FreeAgent for all of our contractor client base as it is designed for precisely that sort of business. It is useless at self assessment and we use a different system for their tax returns , that system is aimed at accountants with a multi client base, not single taxpayers.

We have non contractor clients on Quickbooks (and other ledger systems as well) but again we don't do their tax returns on those systems for the same reason.

Gosimpletax is not aimed at accountancy practices and I know nothing about it.

My gut reaction to your type of situation is always to ask, how good are you with Excel? A single (computer literate) taxpayer can easily maintain their own records themselves and just needs a system to organise the figures in a way that facilitates them being totalled, ideal territory for a spreadsheet. Populate the tax return itself with your figures and let it do the tax calcs for you. After all you can run the online tax return as many times as you want, just don't hit submit until you are ready.

RTodd_2

Thanks both! I have been running a spreadsheet up till now which has been good and does calculations for me but my rental income and PAYE income are newer additions and it's starting to feel clunky and take more and more time. I guess I was just intrigued to find out if there was a way of simplifying things a bit but obviously not. I'll stick to what I've been doing.

Cannot wait for the technology to catch up on this though.

Huge thanks again!