Improved tax season profitability by 33%, resulting in a net profit of £70,000

The challenge

Our client came to us in October 2017 looking to file 700+ tax returns for its Contractor clients over a period of four months. With such a high-volume of work coming in during the busy season, our client wanted to protect its in-house staff from fatigue.

According to our client, ” In the past, I have tried to deal with the tax return rush in-house, but as I had a high volume of tax returns to complete this year, this approach was creating serious problems in my workforce’s productivity.”
And with half their contractors filing taxes for the first time, our client had to first register them with HMRC and then file their tax returns. With a small internal tax team, they did not want to recruit additional internal resources to deal with the rush and decided outsourcing was the right solution.

The solution

Having chosen QXAS to deal with the tax returns, our clients moved rapidly to start using our service. In order to ensure the timely completion of 700+ tax returns, we appointed a dedicated Account Manager and collected their clients’ tax details using a customised tax checklist. Once we had the data, our team of three tax professionals started to work on two simultaneous processes:

1. Register new contractors with HMRC
   We immediately started enrolling new contractors for HMRC’s self-assessment service at the Government Gateway. Upon receiving the UTR code, we registered the contractors and started filing their tax returns.
2. Start filing tax returns
   Our tax team started completing 5-8 tax returns a day using CCH software. Each completed tax return was provided in a PDF format via our secure online portal so our client could review them before we filed with HMRC.

Overall, we completed 40-50 tax returns a week, and filed all 700+ tax returns before the January 31 deadline. With tax returns being filed for £55 per tax return, we drove their tax season profitability by 33%, resulting in a net profit of £70,000.