Flung from the hamster wheel of life

Flung from or flung off? Can’t really decide but this will do for now. You sort of know what I mean don’t you?

Actually this week hasn’t been quite that bad but you gotta love that title. Made me smile… which doesn’t often happen on a cold Thursday in February.

Whoa! (or wow!, having trouble with thinking today) that was a really bracing walk this lunchtime. Driving in the car it said 9C, not too bad, then warm office and lunch then a quick look at the weather app on the phone and you decide -4C windchill is nothing to get worked up about. Certainly not compared with New York, Mid West USA or Russia.

But then again I’m a namby-pamby southerner in UK terms and I DON’T do cold weather.

Period.

Which means I froze. 18mph NW winds, not even North or nor’ east and it was biting cold. I could have worn the gloves and the woolly hat – nay, I SHOULD have worn – but I thought I’d prove it was getting nearer spring. No one to blame but myself then.

Hamsters. Have you seen that wonderful video on Facebook? Hamster stops, wheel doesn’t hamster continues. Soooo funny. Tears weeping from the eyes funny.

For me. Not sure how the hamster saw it.

All the !*!* tax returns that could go in did go in. Not without their little foibles but it got done. As of yesterday first thing, four awaiting filing, three without client go ahead and one unstarted but the information to hand (last bit received late-Tuesday) so I’m basically looking at a busy-ish morning and maybe put my feet up in the afternoon.

Fat chance.

As it was something other than income tax returns that caused the aggro.

Corporation tax (CT) no less. Which is actually a more straightforward regime than income tax (IT). CT is payable 9 months and a day after the company year end and the tax return (CT600) must be filed by the first anniversary. So, from an accountancy firm’s point of view, it spreads out through the year so no last minute panics – just twelve minor ones instead.

Okay it does clump a bit as you always seem to have excessively greater numbers of clients with December or March year ends than all the rest but still pretty much achievable.

Until the irresistible force of the deadline meets the immovable object of the software and, just occasionally I will admit, the wheels come off. So, 31st January year end and 31st January filing date meets IT deadline. Client gets things done in good time, or it would be if it wasn’t income tax season so it’s file on the deadline again this year.

Give me my dues, I TRIED to file late-Tuesday. Only to receive my first rejection, so log a ticket with the support team at after 23.00 that evening. E-mail response early-ish Wednesday with solution. Which isn’t. And eventually a member of the support team contacts me and dials in to see what I can see.

Apparently corrected (like all computer programmes, if it needs to have the same description in two places and it doesn’t, or there is an unspotted blank, or it’s Wednesday (sorry, made that one up) it fails some internal test and you have to guess what the error message means, which might as well be in Belgian for all the sense it makes. At this remove from the actual experience I find myself wondering, if it wants the bl00dy thing to be the same, why doesn’t it pre-populate from one place to the other and save ME the trouble of having to do so?), saves as an iXBRL file correctly and imports without trouble into the CT programme. Passes the validation checks at this end so off it goes.

For my second rejection. And the third. Small revision that could have cleared the issue didn’t – by now it’s midway through the lazy afternoon I’d been hoping to get and I’ve just started my billing. Gotta love January bills but would prefer not to have the extremes of effort. Carefully list out the fees and cannot shake the feeling that there are one or two I’ve missed but nothing obvious so another email from software support with some HTML code to overlay on the template and – FINALLY!!! – goes through a little before 18.00.

So much for the downtime.

Sigh…

So finally I question whether the template needs updating and this morning I get instructions on how to update said template to the newest version.

Which begs the question. THIS IS A CLOUD BASED PRODUCT. Why doesn’t it update the templates itself???

It’s not just me is it?

Oh. Quick shout out to my antipodean reader Damien, though I might well have to tell him I’ve mentioned him on LinkedIn because the free version of WordPress doesn’t give me the ability to sign up readers, you have to remember to go look each week or spot my post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I have no problem with paying for this but the entry level subscription is currently £20.83 per month! As it happens we’ll migrate it to within the OFD website which has a free sign up routine (now just about working properly – little problem between Zoho and the site, HTML again funnily – which has held up the move) so it’s cost me nothing in the end except a lot of aggravation…

Stocktake first thing caused the morning to vanish and I’ve got a shortened afternoon today because of a blood test tomorrow. FASTING blood test which is why I’ve been ignoring it. Last year I got away with it but this year they’re getting stroppy and won’t renew my tablets until I do. Twelve hours without anything other than water from 20.50 this evening. I get “hangry” so I guarantee I’m going to be major strop until I return tomorrow morning. In fact I can feel the irritation raising my hackles as I type. Grrrrr.

Now I have to try and work out what I’ve put off from January because I could do so (like the second half of my bills – and I DID miss a bill or two as noted above. In fact I missed FIVE. How the feck can you miss FIVE BILLS!), what is on the horizon that needs doing (like VAT returns) with short-term deadlines – with the potential of a minor tiff in one case where we are being accused (might be too strong a word but will do for now) of not telling them the VAT due but where they could look it up themselves (and I know that they know how to) but is going to cause a cash flow hiccough. And so it goes…