As the dust settles… Self Assessment January 2010 Review

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 Jim Mackenzie No comments

The sound that best describes the start of February for everyone involved in Self Assessment filing is probably “Phew!” There’s a certain freedom that comes with successfully navigating the filing deadline. The team here have put in some late nights and long days to help you with your queries, and we certainly enjoy the return to normality that February marks.

I’m hoping to start a tradition, where we perform a review of the filing season just passed, and look at what went well, and where we could get better for next year. I’d love to hear what you think, about what we can do to make January 2011 more peaceful for you, and about what you felt went well in January 2010; please drop me a comment below, or email me at info@keytime.co.uk.

The Great

1000 tax queries solved (385 in the last 5 days).
This was our busiest January on record, and a real trial by fire for our new support system, which helped us answer queries faster, more consistently, and gave real-time views of the number of outstanding issues as we edged towards the deadline.

I have high hopes that you’ll see the benefits of our new support portal, where you can search for answers, make suggestions for improvements to the software, send queries to the support team, and check the status of existing questions. The team will be adding more guides, workarounds and helpful tips and tricks as we move through the year, and I hope we’ll see you getting involved too, to make it your first port of call.

You can find our support portal at http://support.keytime.co.uk.

57,000 successfully filed returns in January.
In a record-breaking year for online filing (HMRC have released figures that show that 6,429,899 returns were filed on-time for this tax year, a near 12% increase on last year), our customers rattled through over 57,000 during January alone. I think filing 1.3 returns per minute is pretty impressive! We are proud to have helped take online filing to 75% of all returns submitted this year, and are looking forward to even more returns being filed with Keytime next year.

The Filing Deadline Survival Kit
We’ve had some great, positive feedback about our collection of the most asked questions, especially from the new customers who joined the Keytime fold this January. Containing a list of articles covering all the basics, and a few tips and tricks to help weather January, the survival kit has proved popular, and we’ll be expanding it for next year. If you have any suggestions for topics we could include, let me know in the comments.

The Big Freeze
January started briskly, with the weather conspiring against most of Britain. While we were right in the thick of the snow in our Oldham offices, we were able to work remotely, and keep those tax queries ticking along. It was a good test of our ability to cope with adverse conditions, and we’ll be learning from the experience to keep closer to 100% service, whatever the weather throws at us.

The Not so Great

Download availability.
With a surge of late buyers, (including a (hopefully) fast typer who bought at 23:57 on January 31st!), we had some difficulty with our servers keeping up with demand for the software. With some quick changes, we were able to work around this, but we want to make some changes this year to speed up the download. I hope to have some specifics to share with you after the release of the 2010 software in April.

Queue times.
I hate queuing on the phone to speak to someone, and I know I’m not the only one! During the busy period, we took some extra steps to try and ensure that the wait to speak to someone was as short as possible, including extended opening hours for the penultimate Thursday and Friday, and opening over the deadline weekend.

We have some ideas on how we can reduce waiting times for next year, starting with making the help documentation easier to find, easier to use, and covering most common queries. If you can find the answer to your question on our support portal, it not only saves you a phone call, it also helps us keep queue times low, so we’ll work to make that a reality for as many questions as possible this year.

Closing thoughts

There are a host of new initiatives we are looking to introduce into the software, to improve your user experience; look out for announcements in the coming months about these. In the meantime, I’d like to wish you all enjoyment of the time until we start over again in April.

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