It’s been Xero Education Month in the UK and I was the most excited about the sneak peek of our personal tax module for Xero Tax.

If you missed it, you’ll be able to watch the sneak peek of personal tax session on-demand until the end of March here. In the meantime, here’s a summary of some of the key takeaways.:

The Xero Tax story so far…

It was nearly a year ago that we launched Xero Tax – a cloud-based accounts production and tax filing solution.

Xero Tax is available at no extra cost, exclusively for accountants and bookkeepers who are on our partner programme.

The aim is to provide our accounting partners with a complete end-to-end cloud compliance solution, which:

• takes information from Xero’s bookkeeping product
• helps you easily produce accounts and to file all types of tax returns.

Thousands of accounting practices are already using Xero Tax and the feedback has been amazing. Of the partners we’ve heard from, 90% have told us that Xero Tax is quicker to use than the software they used previously.

Take Gillian French of DNA Accountants. At her firm, she’s pioneered a long overdue transformation of the tax filing space. By using Xero Tax at the start of the pandemic, she was able to quickly pivot from desktop software to a fully integrated cloud compliance solution.

What’s happening with personal tax?

We’ve been testing our personal tax module with a number of our accounting partners. We’ll be launching it this summer and partners will be able to access it through Xero HQ.

We also recently hit an exciting milestone. Cheryl Sharp, one of our Xero partners, submitted the first ever self-assessment filing from Xero directly through to HMRC. As with our corporation tax module, it is the same connected, cloud-based system. This module will be available free, at no additional charge for Xero partners.

How will personal tax help?

For business income, the new module connects your client’s data directly from the Xero ledger, automatically populating the tax return. This allows you to add other sources and file the full return from within Xero. It’ll reduce the need to manually input data, automating processes and streamlining your workflows. You will spend significantly less time on each job.

We’ll continue to develop accounts production in Xero Tax, to eventually include support for sole traders, landlords and partnerships.

One thing we are also developing is Documents Packs. This is a feature we are currently trialling with our Next Generation Practice Insiders. Available in Xero HQ, Document Packs makes it easier to collate client documents, share them easily and get the signatures you need fast.

Both personal tax and our existing corporation tax and account modules will integrate directly with Document Packs allowing you to combine your client’s Tax Return and other supporting documents for them to review and sign all from one place.

The future of compliance

Digitisation of tax is high up the Government’s agenda. As the Making Tax Digital (MTD) rollout continues, many more businesses will be impacted.

At Xero, we will continue to support the transition to MTD with Xero Tax. Our aim is to streamline your workflows, and get you and your clients ready for MTD in the future.

This fits into our vision for the Next Generation Practice, which maps out an unified experience in managing your practice within Xero. It supports the future of of compliance by:

• Bringing together bookkeeping, tax filing, working papers, client and job management – so they are all part of the Xero HQ experience.
• Seamlessly connecting the apps you use every day

The British accounting and bookkeeping community plays a hugely important role in both shaping the future of tax and compliance and supporting small businesses.  

We will be ready to support you with the next phases of MTD. We are also committed to reinventing compliance by co-designing the future practice experience with you.

Testing has already started with a small group of pre-selected partners who are actively filing with Xero Tax. We’ll be expanding testing, adding further partners through to launch. We’ll be in touch directly with partners about this. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact your account manager.