Who can claim £5,000 tax-free interest?

polymaff

dales1 wrote: »

That truly is an excellent demo.

(And it gives a nice round saving, as you say, as long as the typo for BRB is remedied to 34,500 (not 33,500)).

Well done !

Dales.

Well done, you - and thanks for the feedback.

polymaff

Dazed_and_confused wrote: »

Going with the BRB of £33,500 is the magic number £100? Should be a liability of £9360 rather than £9460?

That's for a rest of the UK taxpayer. Will have a go at a Scottish taxpayer later

The saving is a number of hundreds of pounds - an even rounder number of hundreds of pounds when you use the (now) corrected BRB

polymaff

Kenhere wrote: »

I don't suppose anyone knows if such an Excel doc is freely available anywhere?

I'm only aware of two pieces of software that get this right - and by right I mean "handling the SRA correctly" One is a paid for item from:

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

The other is my own coding - just done to try to beat back mental decay and so currently doing all the challenging bits correctly - but without a user input interface.

Kenhere

The alternative approach with less tax! Does this mean that the commercial software for Self Assessment and online filing with HMRC calculates a higher tax due? What do you do if you don't want to have to complete SA and file manually?

polymaff

Kenhere wrote: »

The alternative approach with less tax! Does this mean that the commercial software for Self Assessment and online filing with HMRC calculates a higher tax due? What do you do if you don't want to have to complete SA and file manually?

It still may do. If I recall correctly, HMRC released over 20 versions of their 2017/18 self-assessment software design specification (This is a document they make public so that third-party software suppliers can offer "compliant" software packages to the Accountancy industry) As each version crashed and burned when it was tried out, HMRC just kept patching - patching - and patching, and releasing new design specifications again and again. As is the way with all such policies, the total number of errors at first fell, but then became to rise. The two significant areas that have bugged them to the end have been - surprise, surprise - SRA and the optimal distribution of PA.

During all of this shenanigans - still ongoing shenanigans - HMRC regularly released documents warning how some taxpayers would have to submit paper returns which would be manually processed - because the online assessment software was broken. Our experience of this was that all they did was to feed the paper submission through the dodgy software and so - surprise, surprise again - you got back the wrong answers - eight wasted weeks later.

So what of the commercial software? Sure, it was compliant to the wrong design specification. It is amazing how faithfully the commercial suppliers mimicked all the bugs in the HMRC system. After a lot of comment in accounting circles, the commercials woke up to the fact that they had to do more than crib the HMRC trash - and started to, at first, flag up that this particular return could not be submitted electronically but had to be a paper submission and - after a while some even would report, alongside the "compliant" calculation - a shot at what the calculation should be.

You think I'm making this up! Surely nobody could be this incompetent?

'Fraid not, 'Fraid so !

To address your final question - what do you do? You find a software package / web-posting you are willing to trust and you bone up yourself. Bone up so that you can - at least - perform a "sanity" check on the chosen calculation's outputs.

I've already identified the commercial package I'd think I'd be most likely to trust. As for the web - I've regularly put up my "simple, visual" models and they've garnered quite a bit of kudos over the years.

Kenhere

polymaff wrote: »

It still may do. If I recall correctly, HMRC released over 20 versions of their 2017/18 self-assessment software design specification (This is a document they make public so that third-party software suppliers can offer "compliant" software packages to the Accountancy industry) As each version crashed and burned when it was tried out, HMRC just kept patching - patching - and patching, and releasing new design specifications again and again. As is the way with all such policies, the total number of errors at first fell, but then became to rise. The two significant areas that have bugged them to the end have been - surprise, surprise - SRA and the optimal distribution of PA.

During all of this shenanigans - still ongoing shenanigans - HMRC regularly released documents warning how some taxpayers would have to submit paper returns which would be manually processed - because the online assessment software was broken. Our experience of this was that all they did was to feed the paper submission through the dodgy software and so - surprise, surprise again - you got back the wrong answers - eight wasted weeks later.

So what of the commercial software? Sure, it was compliant to the wrong design specification. It is amazing how faithfully the commercial suppliers mimicked all the bugs in the HMRC system. After a lot of comment in accounting circles, the commercials woke up to the fact that they had to do more than crib the HMRC trash - and started to, at first, flag up that this particular return could not be submitted electronically but had to be a paper submission and - after a while some even would report, alongside the "compliant" calculation - a shot at what the calculation should be.

You think I'm making this up! Surely nobody could be this incompetent?

'Fraid not, 'Fraid so !

To address your final question - what do you do? You find a software package / web-posting you are willing to trust and you bone up yourself. Bone up so that you can - at least - perform a "sanity" check on the chosen calculation's outputs.

I've already identified the commercial package I'd think I'd be most likely to trust. As for the web - I've regularly put up my "simple, visual" models and they've garnered quite a bit of kudos over the years.

HMRC. Good grief.

polymaff

By the way, just as some evidence, you'd expect HMRC should get the software working by the start of the relevant tax year. Here is a link to HMRC's own list of bugs they knew about three months AFTER the END of the relevant tax year.

Open the document and then do a search for the phrase starting rate and you will see how many SRA errors were still outstanding. You will also note that many are given the status "Planned fix for 18/19"

a.k.a. "We haven't a clue"

http://sageone-help.s3.amazonaws.com/en/ukie/2017-18-exc-indi-v2%200.pdf

short_butt_sweet

polymaff wrote: »

The saving is a number of hundreds of pounds - an even rounder number of hundreds of pounds when you use the (now) corrected BRB

i may be confused. i get £43.75 saving, using the corrected BRB. or no saving, using the original figure.

Dazed_and_confused

My £100 reduction was gained by making more of the non savings income subject to tax. That moved the £500 savings allowance rate band from using some of the basic rate band into the higher rate band, effectively saving £500 @ 20%.

Will give it another go as polymaff had clearly got an even bigger saving which has so far eluded me!!

dales1

Tip - check out Polymaff's guidance notes for allocating the Personal Allowance(s) to income classes.
Dales