With that said, the practical problem most shops actually have is not a lack of knowledge about tax. It is that a date arrives and the records needed to meet it take a week to assemble, so the deadline is missed by a business that was perfectly willing to meet it.
Where the line sits
| Khata does | Khata does not |
|---|---|
| Track filing deadlines on a calendar | Prepare a return |
| Remind you before one arrives | Submit anything to any authority |
| Record which periods you have marked filed | Confirm that a filing was accepted |
| Export sales, purchases and expenses | Tell you what you owe |
| Support GST and non-GST invoice formats, and VAT billing in NPR | Advise which format applies to you |
That right-hand column is not a list of things we have not got round to. Filing is a professional judgement with legal consequences attached, and software that guesses at it on your behalf is doing you harm while appearing to help.
The setup, once
- 1
Ask your accountant for your actual list of deadlines
Which filings apply to you and on what dates. Write it down. This conversation takes fifteen minutes and does not need repeating unless your registration or turnover changes.
- 2
Put each one on the calendar with a reminder ahead of it
The reminder needs to arrive early enough to be useful. A notification on the day tells you that you are already late in every way that matters.
- 3
Agree what your accountant needs, and in what form
Ask before the first deadline rather than during it. Usually sales, purchases, expenses and tax figures for the period, in a format they can work with.
- 4
Mark each period filed once it is done
So that in four months you can see which periods are closed without having to reconstruct it from your inbox.
The monthly habit that makes deadlines uneventful
The shops that find filing stressful are almost never the ones that do not know the rules. They are the ones assembling three months of records in the two days before a date.
Exporting the same reports on the same day every month turns that into a twenty-minute job at a calm time. It is exactly the same work, moved to a point where nothing depends on it being finished today.
The deadline is rarely the problem. The week of searching before it usually is.