Accountants may want to check out the HMRC website and look at the Business Tax Dashboard that was added during the Revenue’s Easter maintenance offline period.
The drive towards online filing has so far been all about tax accountants and taxpayers sending their information electronically to HMRC. The Business Tax Dashboard will allow accountants to see information about smaller business customers that has been collated from all the online tax portals.
The Dashboard gives an overall picture that includes payments already received and the balances still outstanding. Depending on the type of business, you will either see self-assessment or corporation tax information. Employers will also be able to see PAYE and VAT information if their business is registered for HMRC’s online services.
At the moment the Dashboard primarily provides a way to view your information. The only interaction is a facility to change contact details. You will not be able to reallocate payments between different taxes or periods.
The system contains corporation tax data from October 1st 1993 onwards, self-assessment from 1996-97 until the present, PAYE from 2010-11 and the current VAT period plus the preceding 15 months.
Dashboards will be updated weekly (over the weekend) to reflect all returns and payments received by HMRC during the week.
The dashboard can be accessed using the same login you use for self-assessment or corporation tax filing. This could cause delays for employers who employ an accountant to do their main filing but do VAT and PAYE filing themselves.
HMRC has no plans to give agents access to the dashboards in the immediate future but they can get around it by asking clients to give them administrator access to their account. A Revenue spokesperson said an agent dashboard would be provided at a later date.