Congratulations to all the accounting teams who have survived the perilous January period and come out on the other side!

Long nights and weekends working can be par for the course as the self-assessment deadline looms.

Even as accounting teams rallied around the nation’s taxpayers, one million still managed to miss a deadline that shouldn’t be such a cause of stress in the first place.

If it’s any comfort, 1.1 million people missed the deadline last year, so if the trend continued it should only take about ten years for everyone to meet the deadline.

If you don’t want the next decade to look the same, then it might be worth thinking about a new approach for self-assessment tax returns.

What is causing people to miss the tax deadline?

It can be incredibly disheartening that, despite your best efforts, so many clients still seem to struggle with getting their taxes sorted out on time.

The headline-grabbing news is how many people missed the deadline, but the greater stress for accountants is how many people leave it to the last minute to file.

We might not have the stats on how many people filed in the last minute, but we know that, in the hour before the deadline, 27,456 people filed their taxes.

The day of the deadline saw HMRC fielding 5,409 webchats and 10,483 calls and we can only guess as to how many more accountants were dealing with.

Even with all that hard work, HMRC now stands to benefit from at least £100 million in fines off the back of the missed deadline.

The tragedy is that some of that money is owed by people who would have had nothing to pay had they filed their taxes on time.

How can taxes be handled better this year?

The real heartbreak of the whole self-assessment tax thing is that it is easily avoidable if clients understood the benefits of cracking on with it early.

Rather than chasing them endlessly and hopelessly throughout the year, more time could be spent showing clients the benefits to them.

This will include them having greater control of their tax bill and the ability to make payments in a more controlled way.

There is also the greater access to HMRC that being early brings with it.

Your clients may have sat among 10,000 other people trying to get HMRC’s help and if they file early, then they can get more tailored support.

Alternatively, they can reach out to you when you are less busy.

To make the self-assessment tax return deadline less stressful, you might feel as though you need a dedicated team to chase client information all year round.

Rather than assigning valuable resources to the task, it might be more effective to let technology take over.

Glasscubes automatically follows up with clients to get their information at a frequency that you select so that you can keep a steady eye on your clients without them feeling too much pressure.

When information does come in, your team can see it and deal with it effectively, as every part of the process is clearly labelled with how much work is left to be done.

Firms using Glasscubes see a 50% reduction in the time clients take to respond to information requests and a 40% increase in the number of responses.

Book a demo to find out how to make the next self-assessment tax deadline less stressful!