Every January, a few million people in the UK sit down to do something they have been avoiding since April. The Self Assessment return is not hard in the way a tax adviser means hard. Most of the people filing it have one trade or a couple of properties, a bank account, and a shoebox. It is hard in the way bad process is hard: the questions are asked in HMRC’s words, the figures have to be added up by hand from twelve statements, and the choice on offer is a free form that assumes you know what a box means or an accountant at several hundred pounds for an evening’s work.
We followed one return through from the shoebox to the submission. The adding up took longer than the form. The form took longer than it should because every answer had to be translated from “the van” into the right box. The only decision that needed a person was whether a Friday fuel receipt was for work. Everything else was reading, sorting and arithmetic, and all of it was being done by the one person in the room least suited to it.
That is the shape of a process worth building for: high volume, low judgement, done once a year by people who never get practised at it. Swiftmore reads the statements, places every line, asks the few questions that need a person in plain English, and files when the person presses submit. It is free to keep records in and £99 when you file, recognised by HMRC, and live now at swiftmore.co.uk.
The lesson we took back to the consultancy is the usual one. The expensive part of the process was not the tax. It was the reading.