Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining me today. My name is Jamie Royston-Smith and I’m Senior Account Manager at TaxCalc. I’ve been with the business nine years and my role involves looking after some of our key accountant partners, to maximise their use of the TaxCalc ecosystem. And it’s my pleasure to welcome you to our Tech Talk today. If you’re not already familiar with TaxCalc, we provide beautiful and innovative software solutions to over 9000 accountancy practices, and 45,000 taxpayers in the UK and globally. Today, we’ll be focusing on our accountancy practice solutions, and how they can support the growth of a modern-day firm.

What I’d like to do first of all, is introduce you to the market problem we aim to solve and in turn identify where TaxCalc has established itself in the market in the past few years. And in my role, having spoken to hundreds of firms over the past few years, I believe most practices fall into one of two very broad categories. One would be a foundationally strong practice with good process, proactive client service and strong growth potential, or otherwise a reactive client-led firm who feel like they’re constantly firefighting. And despite the cloud revolution of client apps and technology coming to the fore, without a solid and sustainable core business, many firms struggle to implement these new technologies and service. And they become burdensome tasks that get in the way of fulfilling client’s obligations. And what we want to avoid is the model we see onscreen which is compliance inefficiency, where the client drives the interaction, and where the right software process is not in place to drive the process, and to take control.

And of course, this is especially true, whilst the profession recovers from the impact of COVID-19. In a report compiled by TaxCalc, Document Manager partner SmartVault, 62% of survey respondents said that their greatest challenge is keeping clients informed of changes. And of course, that’s all about trying to increase the tailored service that matches their needs. And clients are demanding this kind of support and advice from their advisors. And your firm needs to be in a position to deliver this.

And we’re also hearing this from our customers too, in that important changes to clients businesses can’t really wait any longer, and whilst much of 2020 has been about keeping your client’s businesses afloat, we’re hearing that 2021 is going to be a year of implementing necessary change to secure the future of these businesses.

And so where do TaxCalc fit into all of this? Well established 16 years ago, we’ve been delivering for our practices year after year. We started with around 1500 firms and have recently exceeded 9000 live practice customers. And we believe in terms of market share that represents a significant proportion of the number of tax agents registered at HMRC.

We have an incredible team of 120 staff across the UK, most of whom form our Development and Production Teams, and we deliver several Feature Pack Releases every year. And these new features are released far quicker than the market average. And perhaps most importantly, we’re fiercely independent and privately owned, which allows us to serve our UK accountants with unswerving focus, and no external shareholders to satisfy means we can deliver what the market wants, and what our customers need.

So allow me to introduce you to the five key solutions we offer a practice, and then talk through five key foundations which I believe compound to deliver efficiency and growth for our customers.

The first on the left here would be Practice Management, which includes workflow and deadline tracking, document storage and client portal, as well as eSign solutions to make client touch points a breeze.

Next would be Practice Compliance, which includes AML and GDPR Centre, to ensure your internal operations meet the high standards expected of the profession.

Next would be HMRC & Taxation, and of course tax is in the name and that’s where it all started. And we supply comprehensive tax return software, and it’s also award-winning too, after picking up Best Tax Software at the Software Excellence Awards in 2020.

Next will be Financial Reporting, which is everything required to prepare accurate and compliant year-end statements, including online filing to Companies House. Also award-winning, picking up Best Accounts Production Software at the Software Excellence Awards in 2020.

And lastly Company Secretarial, so with limited companies a very common trading vehicle, administration tools are available to keep Companies House updated of any changes. And you can also incorporate new companies too.

Great. So how does TaxCalc help build a solid and dependable compliance platform on which you can grow your firm? So as I said, I’d like to introduce you to these five key pillars.

The first is the fact that all products are integrated with each other and share the same client data set. So not only is there internal integration from like accounts to tax, but you can also connect with leading bookkeeping apps, and also import data straight from HMRC and Companies House.

The sophisticated workflow management tools give you clear visibility of your compliance process, and your due-dates. So you can basically never miss a task. Your staff and teams will know exactly what their next step is, and you can even record their time as they go, or they can record their time as they go.

Clients want ease of access to their information, which is why we integrate with leading cloud document management provider SmartVault, to give your clients access to their reports and files. And eSign is built right into TaxCalc, to allow fast approval before submission.

And perhaps most importantly, the software is incredibly simple to use. And I always say this to new customers, but don’t underestimate the time savings available when you’re using a fast and modern interface, which just gives you that confidence to empower your staff to do more in the system, and to also free up your own time. So we’ve seen that time and time again, with new starters and new firms implementing TaxCalc, the feedback is always that they can empower more of their staff to do more of that work. So they can free up their own time, to perhaps go on to do more lucrative and exciting work with their clients.

And finally, the suite is fully cloud-based allowing flexible access from anywhere you have an internet connection. And that also means nothing needs to be installed on your premises. And we handle all the updates and backups for you, so perfect for the new way of working.

We’ve heard directly from customers about how this affects their business or their firm. And with compliance no longer a distraction, the firm can venture into other more lucrative and exciting work, to help clients grow and improve their businesses. And here are just a number of examples of additional activity and growth that can be achieved, when a core system like TaxCalc is implemented wholesale.

Great, I’d like to give you a quick demo and very quick tour of how TaxCalc works and operates, just to give you that feeling of how it works. So here’s TaxCalc running on my machine here, and what I like to do first of all is give you quick access to Practice Manager, which is your main client list. So you’ll see all of your clients listed on this screen.

We’ve then got Work Management and all the job tracking feeding off of that data. And you can see here that we can identify the stages that we’re up to with our particular job, and the deadlines that are coming up against that. So it will easily identify what’s going on in your practice. Because it’s all linked to the compliance software, you can link straight into your set of accounts or your tax returns. So it’s all linked together, and any progress is updated retrospectively into the system. So it will always keep up-to-date for you.

Next, we’ve got Personal Tax, you can just simply go through and complete your client’s returns. As I say we believe this is one of the most sophisticated personal tax systems in the market. And we have something here called SimpleStep, which is our unique questionnaire guide through the tax return, to help you focus on the sections that you do need to do, whilst avoiding the sections that aren’t required for your clients.

We can then go in and eSign an envelope with our clients, or get them to eSign it as part of that process. So before we go on and submit this to HMRC, we need to get approval on that.

Finally, I’ll just touch on one of the compliance features. So in here we’ve got AML Centre, and our firm-wide compliance where we can run risk assessments and audits on our own practice to make sure that we are keeping up with the standards expected of us. And this screen here called Client Due Diligence is really useful. It gives us a whitespace analysis of all of the clients in our database and whether we’ve completed an ID, Risk Assessment, or Electronic Verification of all of those clients.

So it’s all in one place, all in one suite, and I hope that’s a quick useful introduction. Of course, we’ll take you through a full demo, if that’s something you’d like to look at in time.

Finally, just coming back to the presentation, just got one or two more slides to finish. We just wanted to map out what a switch to TaxCalc might look like, if you were interested in moving across. Whilst you evaluate TaxCalc, we’ll give you a dedicated sales contact to give you a demo, to take you through the software and the considerations around the actual switching process. In terms of the key stakeholders required from your side, of course we’d recommend a Managing Partner, or key team member, such as a core member of your Production Team, are available to help get staff buy-in, and to roll out the project smoothly.

We can then go on to convert data from your current supplier. So whatever you’re using in the industry at that moment, we’ll work with you to bring across as much data as possible, and we’ve got routines in place from all the leading suppliers.

And we’ve got a full onboarding service available. So not only can we help you, obviously, make that decision and get your data across, but we can help you then implement the software and get the project off to a good start.

And then long-term to track the progress of the project and to help with anything else going on in your practice, we have a dedicated Account Management Team. So you’ll have a dedicated contact within that team, to help you and the partnership to move forward together. So we really try to look after our customers on top of all the support channels, and we do our best to give you one-on-one contact.

So thank you for your time. I hope that’s useful, and please contact us on the details on screen if you have any further questions.

Thank you very much.