HMRC accounts

There has been a similar situation for VAT for some time. In that case there is free software around that can read specific cells from a spreadsheet and send them to HMRC in the approved way.

There may well be something similar for company accounts. It may also be that low-cost software can be bought to do the job. Have a look at Taxcalc to see whether they offer anything suitable. John

It's happening in many forms of tax submissions. Anyone self employed, with a turnover of £50k+ is in the same boat, it reduces, iirc, to £30k next year, bringing the vast majority of full time self employed people into the bracket of needing software, compatible with HMRCs system, to submit their tax forms, rather than being able to just input the figures as what happens now. The other thing that is happening is that rather than annual tax submissions, they are going to 3 monthly. All the details are on the HMRC website under 'making tax digital'.

From one of the HMRC pages is a list of suitable software. Of the list of around 20 providers, only 2, again, iirc, are free, and reports are that they are free for a reason - they arent very good. Apparently there are some software providers who do it as a pay as you go system, so you can just pay for one submission, rather than buy the software.

I'm hoping they have an alternative for dormant companies.

I dont think so, see the bottom paragraph from the linked page below:

I thought 'software submission' was becoming compulsory in February

I'm director of two tiny companies one of which has been 'not trading' for a few years. I asked Companies House if I had to submit a load of zeroes using software and they said that I would have to.

I think we should demand something open source at least, the government demands it of others now.

From what I can see XRBL is an open standard:

- eg in their example

So to generate iXRBL it's just a report in HTML plus some extra tags to annotate particular fields.

I think the idea is that companies do their accounts in their normal software and press a button to report to the tax authorities via XRBL. That means there's no 'preparation' of accounts necessary as the data is already captured in their software, you just inspect the final report and press send. Or they can produce their regular shareholder report with embedded iXRBL and submit that.

There's no reason why open source solutions can't exist. eg:

According to the HMRC guide:

So if you do accounts in Excel there may be a way to tag fields in the spreadsheet so you can generate XRBL. I would not be surprised if somebody has done a template spreadsheet with the right tags and a flow to export XRBL - then all you need to do is edit it with the data for your company.

Theo

I'm hoping that they have an alternative for pensioners who get sucked into tax paying because of unchanged tax thresholds. I'm almost certain to become a suckee next year.

It's eight years since I've had to submit business tax returns of any sort and however tiresome it might be, I can see that obtaining specific software is just one of the (many) costs of doing business if in fact you are doing business. But unless the revenue are going to magically put pensioners on a PAYE-alike system it seems grossly unfair that they/we should have to shell out extra money to comply. Not to mention that there are still elderly people amongst the digitally excluded.

Nick

There is also only one 'approved' SW that runs under Linux, and that ('stansoft') looks ... pretty hard work.

I have recently formed a small company and was hoping to use a PTA (plain Text Accounting -

Does it need to be approved? Or can you use your own tools, just that they haven't tested them and bugs are your problem?

I know nothing about accounting but it seems somebody has made PTA software do it:

I'm no longer in that situation, as I am now an employee. However, in my opinion, if HMRC require you to use software that matches their requirements, then they should be providing it for you. You should not be incurring costs to buy or subscribe to software, when paper should suffice.

account package and doing what they say is beyond me, what the majority of people need is a simple package where you input turnover, expenses and other fields, and output it to the HMRC template [1]. Just like when filling in the inline tax return now. Simple. But this is HMRC, and they dont do simple, so will now be asking most of the self employed to be paying £200+ for new accouting software, when the current system works perfectly well. Add on the 3 monthly returns soon, and you can see its just a cash generator, so they dont have to wait a year for the tax to be paid, its due every 3 months.

I don't use any software for "calculating my accounts", that's the whole point. My accounts are so trivially simple (one in particular simply consists of columns of zeroes in all sections, year after year) that I have absolutely no need for any software.

There's two places you (may) have to submit accounts, HMRC require accounts for tax purposes, Comapanies house need them annually (why?).

I'm not burdened by HMRC returns for either of the companies of which I'm a director. One is 'not trading' so HMRC allow me to do nothing for them, the other is 'a company limited by guarantee' (or something like that) and is basically a co-operative formed by the residents of a private road. Shares in the company have no value and the company can't make profits or declare dividends so, again, HMRC aren't involved.

However both these companies still have to submit accounts to Companies House, which from February 2027 will require 'software' (whatever that means).

Yes I work as self-employed, so I already pay for an accounts package that includes MTD filing. The reason I have the dormant company is to protect myself from someone else registering the name I use. At the moment I can just sent in a "nada" return for the company to keep HMRC happy, but I wouldn't want to pay double ...

Hopefully it's acceptable to manually craft an XRBL file with the company name and number plus lots of zeroes?

Cant a template be made in Excel.?

'Plain Text Accounts' is for programmers who want to maintain their accounts the same way they write software. It's intentionally very DIY compared with just running Excel or an accounting package. It's a unicycle not a car - you don't pick a unicycle just to get from A to B.

The above guide is like somebody explaining how to fit suspension to their unicycle - it can be done, but 99.9999% of people don't need to do it, because they use a car or the bus instead.

The actual iXRBL looks very simple. You shouldn't need to buy additional software, you should be able to adapt the workflow you currently have. In the case of the spreadsheet, if you start with the right template you should be able to do a 'save as HTML' and upload that file directly - which is even easier then retyping all the numbers.

Theo

Surely pensioners are not employed by a company who have to do company accounts? They may have to declare income for self-assessment, but I've seen no signs XRBL will apply to personal taxes, just company ones.

If you're a pensioner running your income through a company then you might, but then you're very unusual. I doubt pensions can be paid to a company, for example.

Self assessment is just filling in a web form and declaring your income in a few boxes. If you know what your income figure is and don't have anything else going on[*], it's one box to fill in and it should take 10 minutes tops.

Theo

My self-assessment return includes self-employment, and in some previous years has also included employment