Making tax easier – a Government consultation

The Government is consulting on changes to the way businesses and taxpayers deal with Inland Revenue. Proposed changes would make it easier for businesses to manage their tax obligations online and reduce compliance costs.

The Government is seeking New Zealanders’ opinions of the proposals before any changes are made. Feedback is invited through a public online forum and formal discussion document.

Proposed changes would mean simpler PAYE and tax returns, better online services provided by Inland Revenue, less re-work, and reduced business compliance costs. New payroll software would take care of routine PAYE compliance tasks, and tax information could be sent directly between Inland Revenue systems and business payroll software, at times that suit business.

The consultation includes proposals to share information with other government departments, to make it easier for employers and their staff where people are swapping employment, going on parental leave or managing child support.

Strategic partnerships between software developers and Inland Revenue are also proposed, to support software developers to develop and improve tax-related software products for their clients.

You can influence how tax processes might work in the future by visiting www.ird.govt.nz/makingtaxeasier and commenting on the proposals. Videos and stories on the site show differences between dealing with Inland Revenue now and what the future could hold.

The forum will remain open until 23 July 2010.

Success Stories

We’re currently engaging design company Base Two and PR company Ideas Shop and would love to hear about some of the fantastic FlexiTime success stories that our customers can tell. If you’ve got 10-20 minutes to spare we’d love to talk with you and get some feedback about the features in FlexiTime that you love.

One area we are putting a bunch of effort into improving is the rostering in FlexiTime, so if you’re currently using timesheets as a rostering tool please give us a call on 0800 148880.  We would like to hear how you’re currently using it, what works and what doesn’t and we can tell you about our plans.

Thinking Inside the Box

I’ve been working on some major improvements to the Time Entry screen in FlexiTime. Being able to expand a time entry graphically by dragging a handle on either side of the box will be a nice improvement that will speed up entering time.

Other improvements I’m working on are making the whole time scheduler resizable. Currently the proportions of time entries and the scheduler are set based on the size of the application when the flash file is first loaded. If you change the size of the browser window the scheduler stays the same virtual size meaning vertical and horizontal scrollbars are shown. By resizing the scheduler window the whole scheduler is still displayed without scrollbars when the browser window is resized.

What this allows us to do is create a side panel to appear beside the scheduler to hold all those buttons that aren’t used so much but take up screen real estate, such as the zoom button and the radio button for selecting work view or employee view.

We’re also going to use this side panel to display a speed entry view of time entries, so when you click on a time entry you won’t need to double click on it to see the details, they’ll be displayed and modifiable in the speed panel.

We’ve also improved the time entry component itself. Currently you need to hit tab (or enter?) to change between start and end time or between hours and minutes. The new component is going to let you enter time a lot faster by letting you enter 24 hour time, hours and minutes in a single entry box, and FlexiTime will work out what time you meant.

Other things we’re working on are remembering what your last time entry was and defaulting the values on a new time entry and letting you click on the time schedule or drag to create a new time entry at that time.

All these changes should be available in the next couple of weeks all going well.