'Login infrastructure issue' blamed as sustained Xero outage threatens payrolls Hundreds of thousands of small businesses are having trouble raising invoices and sorting out their monthly payroll following an outage at accounting software-as-a-service outfit Xero. The cloud-based software slinger, which boasts around 640,000 customers in the UK including accountants, bookkeepers and SMEs, has posted a …
Unfortunately this completely impossible now, due to realtime VAT reporting and digital automatic filing of VAT & RTI/PAYE. You cannot use more than one accounting package, in the same way using two word processors to write the same document wouldn't make sense.
People should remember that according to HMRC they are solely responsible for their tax affairs, that is when you submit something late, you cannot blame it on "the cloud".
It's also a display of Keynesian economics at its finest - create a tax system that is needlessly complex and expensive to comply with, so that a new sector of companies providing ways of dealing with that complexity can be created. In reality, this does not bring any value to the economy - quite the opposite.
Companies instead of spending their hard earned money on accounting, could spend that on R&D or other things actually helping their business.
Unfortunately rules also have to be complex, to keep the pleb in their lane. We can't have too many entrepreneurs.
"It's also a display of Keynesian economics at its finest..."
?!!
You might need to look up what Keynesian is. Because it's not what you say it is. Although I guess it's getting it wrong with a touch more class than saying "socialist economics" or "Marxist economics".
From the linked article:
The revolutionary ideaKeynes argued that inadequate overall demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. An economy’s output of goods and services is the sum of four components: consumption, investment, government purchases, and net exports (the difference between what a country sells to and buys from foreign countries). Any increase in demand has to come from one of these four components. But during a recession, strong forces often dampen demand as spending goes down. For example, during economic downturns uncertainty often erodes consumer confidence, causing them to reduce their spending, especially on discretionary purchases like a house or a car. This reduction in spending by consumers can result in less investment spending by businesses, as firms respond to weakened demand for their products. This puts the task of increasing output on the shoulders of the government. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention is necessary to moderate the booms and busts in economic activity, otherwise known as the business cycle.
You see, Keynes believed that supply and demand should be controlled by the government. Government can increase the demand for accounting services by increasing complexity of tax affairs.
Then if you pair it with:
"Big four accountancy firms donate £1.9m in services to political parties since 2009"
You can get an idea why this is so broken.
Keynes believed that supply and demand should be controlled by the government.
Not controlled, but moderated. Governments may need to tweak the environment to make it easier or harder for companies to balance supply & demand, that isn't the same as trying to control them with a "Five Year Plan".
I regarded doing my own books as about as welcome as doing my own dentistry.
This is a fair point. There are people who won't even make a sandwich, despite the fact that you don't need to be trained and licensed to make one, you don't need to put sandwich components in a certain way nor use only approved condiments. That being said, these days you pretty much have to use an accountant if you don't want to put yourself in trouble.
Nope paper + XLS are not good enough any more - because its mandated that almost regardless of size (currently VAT threshold of 85K) you have to "Make Tax Difficult" which means its almost a legal requirement to use some kind of web based cloud accountancy package to comply.
Sorry, must have mistyped Make Tax Digital.
Apparently an XLS is too likely to go wrong, compared to the full blown accountancy package where apparently its not possible to make any kind of errors.
HMRC knows exactly how shit using excel for everything is. Self Assessment is an abomination of excel and vba stored in a mainframe and accessed via a an ie6 only web browser.
That's why you can't use it.
Anon because today we got The Talk and I'd like to continue to have a job.
My small company has used Xero for several years now. It is usually reliable, so we're not going to squeal foul because of one outage. As for the VAT you have a whole month to prepare the VAT returns and submit payment to HMRC. If you leave this to the last moment you are asking for trouble. Anyone met Murphy with his JCB digging next to your data line?
Xero does need to look at its major outage procedures and how customers are kept up to date. Lessons to be learned.
My only gripe was that there was no indication on the log in page that there was an issue. So you get the message that your login details are incorrect and you wonder how and whether your account has been hacked. It would have been useful to have something on the log in page saying there's an issue, please click this link to the status page for more info.
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