Friday, March 16, 2007

Payment on acounts

I recently released a mini-series of articles with a load of great business start-up advice (also available to download as a PDF) in which I talk about how the government is really going the extra mile for SMEs at the moment, helping them out in a load of different ways -really trying to encourage entrepreneurship within the United Kingdom. This was something I believed until I got my tax bill.

The deadline for your self-assessment tax return is fast approaching and the government kindly sends you an invoice for your last tax return, mine arrived just before Christmas and to my surprise it was 50% more than I submitted. Seeing as I was off to Cornwall I decided I would deal with it on my return.

I've never had an issue with paying tax, in fact I've always been proud of the fact that I've needed to pay tax, my logic is simple: if I need to pay tax, it means I'm earning! The more tax I pay, the more I've earned. See my logic?

In the past, through claiming back expenses etc my tax bills have always been relatively small and although I seem to recall something called “Payment on account”, but it was IIRC an optional payment so next year the amount you have to pay is smaller. This is a good idea. As a small business owner I do put money aside for my tax bill but that’s always been 25% of each invoice. So what’s my issue?

To me, payment on account seems like a half-arsed attempt by the government to help self-employed people out, while getting a couple more quid in the process, the issue however is I feel they’ve focused more on taking more money than helping out the self-employed people. The idea is simple: You submit your tax bill for the previous tax year, they take an additional payment (payment on account) which will go towards the next tax year, this payment is estimated on their data for you -in this case your tax bill. The first payment is due with your current tax bill, the second in July of the current tax year. Thus splitting the next year’s tax bill into two more manageable payments. -Bollocks does it. Please excuse my French but this is not at all thought out and this is why:

I would consider myself to be one of the more sensible self-employed people when it comes to saving for tax, admittedly the first couple of years I was in business I paid the tax bill with a project we had on at the time but now I do put money aside for it with every invoice (now 50% of every invoice inc VAT goes aside). So come tax return time I have a nice chunk of cash to pay for my tax bill (always more than it needs to be because of expenses etc). I then follow the governments recommendation and fill out my self-assessment tax return online in plenty of time -a word of warning, I live with a chartered accountant who helps me out with this, it’s not something I just do on my own ;). In January I have the invoice for the bill and I pay it out of my savings, anything left I can use as I wish. All good so far! As far as the government is concerned I have followed what they’re recommending and that should be it. Payment on account however throws this into turmoil. What the government IMHO neglects to tell you is that you’re going to have to pay 50% more than you’re expecting in the first year you go over their threshold.

What I don’t like about that is they’re encouraging a lot of self-employed people to complete their own return online (best to do this with an accountant really) and save for their bill but by not telling you about this additional payment they can in theory put someone out of business over night -and there’s nothing you can do about it. Take the average self-employed business owner with a turnover of £50,000. Assuming no expenses you should expect to walk away with around £38,300 (using rough maths). Cool, so you’re good and put £11,700 into savings in preparation and use the rest to pay the bills, buy a holiday, a car etc.

You think all’s dandy until at the end of the year you get a tax bill for £17,550 with a further payment of £5,850 being required in July. That leaves you with £26,600 remaining rather than the initial £38,300 you were expecting. Why? That’s simple -payment on account, the tax office say "Well, you earned £50,000 this year, so you’ll do that next year so we’ll take that money from you now, that way next year you’ll already have some money on account -helping you out. Don’t worry though, if your tax bill for next year is lower, we’ll refund the money." -there are so many issues to this statement but I’ll come back to those.

I've made a graph demonstrating the two differences. The light red segment is the amount you will need to pay in the July following your January tax payment, the dark red section must be paid in addition to your main tax bill.

Take my industry -the IT industry. It’s not unknown (or an infrequent occurrence) to have a large project (i.e. £100,000) which you can complete within a financial year. If you're already working in the sector and this £100,000 contract is your reason for going it alone this could be a serious issue for you. Ignoring how you take this money, by the end of a single fiscal year you take £100,000:

• Turnover:£100,000
• Tax Allowance:£5,000
• Taxable Income:£95,000
• Tax at 22%:£7,700
• Tax at 40%:£24,000
• Expected Tax Bill:£31,700
• Expected to you:£68,300

In the event you’ve taken £100,000 for a project you’re likely to spend a fair amount of that on things like credit cards, niceties after having gone without for a while etc, so you spend a fair whack, perhaps put a chunk on your mortgage, buy a house or invest a fair chunk. Say you get the payment a couple of months before the tax year ends so you take the time off and relax a little, basically using a fair amount of the money, but you’re ok as you’ve put £32,000 into savings in preparation for your tax bill. When it comes to filing time however you’re told that you owe them an additional £15,850 with your current tax bill followed by another payment of £15,850 in July. Starting to see where my issue lies?

If you didn’t spend anymore of that £68,300 than you absolutely had to and some how had the additional £31,700 available you’re fine, but what if you decided to treat someone special, or invest the money where it’s not readily accessible, what can you do? I called the tax office to talk it through with them as I didn’t want to pay this payment on account as it would mean that things would be a little tight until the end of a current system development. The representative had absolutely no concern or understanding for my situation, when I asked her if I could spread the payments a little I was told that interest would be charged on the money if I didn’t pay it and a fine would be incurred. Furthermore she told me that this payment on account was ok because it was tax on money we had already earned (the payment on account is in theory for the current fiscal year), I did think about pointing out that a business’ earnings are not the same as a worker’s salary as they are frequently sporadic and go through highs and lows -in the case of The Site Doctor, the majority of our year’s income comes in during the final fiscal quarter.

There were a couple of things I didn’t like about the representatives statement/government’s perceived understanding of the situation:

1. Great they are trying to help you out with your business -hopefully making the next tax year’s tax bill a smaller payment (or not at all if you think about the logic) but how does making it a forced payment without making it very well known about help?
2. It assumes that your business’ monthly turnover is the same as an employee in that your entire year’s earnings are the same (or similar) each month with no seasonal fluctuations. I know there are some more established businesses which do have a regular income but The Site Doctor certainly doesn’t. As already mentioned, The Site Doctor has the majority of the year’s earnings paid in the final fiscal quarter -after you have to pay your tax bill!
3. They say they’ll refund the money if your next bill is lower than the last so it’s ok. But taking the example of the £50,000 turnover above, that’s a years worth of interest on £11,700 you’ve just lost potential interest of £936 or £2,536 in the example of our £100,000 contract. Can you afford to loose out on that?
4. This can in theory put someone out of business, as it happened, I had to pay this bill mid contract when normally I wouldn’t have had any money for a fair while, to make things worse Stacey was having a short sabbatical. Luckily we had the money in savings but if we didn’t we would have without a doubt found it hard to pay.

The solution?

I don’t like bitching and moaning about things without having some form of solution and I can understand that the government wants to get this cash into the bank and after the first year or two it makes things better for them but for goodness sake make the payment optional, perhaps offer a monthly payment option without penalties or at least inform people about this so they can make provisions for it. Had I not found this out before this tax year I would be in serious trouble. Of course, having a tax specialist do your books should have highlighted this for you -and it goes to show that just because they’re an accountant, if they’re not a specialist they may not know about something that can break the bank (I’ve got no blame for Stacey before you wonder!).

Note: These figures are derived from my own experience so please take professional advice on the matter as for all I know, there may be a sliding scale (I would hope there is) otherwise the government is killing businesses left right and centre. I’d be interested to know if anyone else knew of/has experienced this issue.

Payment on acounts

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Tags: Business | Business Start-up Advice | The Site Doctor | WebDD

 Thursday, March 15, 2007

When customer service goes mad

I rate good/great customer service very highly when it comes to retaining clients and obtaining new clients so it always make me laugh at how some companies value their customer service and more to the point wonder how they’re still in business!

The other day I had a couple of conversations with Fasthosts that I simply had to share. A little background though –we’ve been with Fasthosts for a couple of years now, I think we originally signed up in 1999 through 4as1 and I know we were one of their first customers. Since then we’ve registered around 300 domains with their sister company UKReg without a problem.

More recently however I’ve been feeling less easy about their service. Firstly they started charging for things left right and centre –ok, they’ve got a business to run, next they started to overload the servers (ok it’s a shared server, I can live with that), to combat the overloaded servers they started moving domains –I’m guessing higher demand sites onto their own boxes. That was ok, except they gave you no advanced warning and seeing as a fair few of the sites in question would reference MS Access databases elsewhere would cause us no-end of update fun.

Then their support went down hill to the extent that we often had to wait for ages until the phone was answered (listening to “you are 17th in the queue”). At this point we had just opened an account with Rackspace so had the view to slowly move the domains over. That was until I got an email saying they would now be charging for a number of services that were historically free which cut into our margins –making them negative. That annoyed me somewhat so moving the sites away from Fasthosts was moved up my priority list.

When we first signed up with Fasthosts they were the dogs, cheap hosting with all the bells and whistles –we had a Windows account which meant –unlike others at the time we had free use of ASP and all sorts but now all they seem interested in is the Yankee dollar rather than customer retention.

The other day was the straw that broke the camels back in regards my tolerance of Fasthosts. I had two fairly simple questions and it wasn’t easy to get a straight response to either. The first related to a domain I was adding for a client, they don’t use it but have access to a personal control panel which allows them to manage their emails etc. The control panel although a little outdated does the job. The catch however is recently you need to pay for use of Fasthosts’ control panel or you can build your own through the API. I didn’t need half the stuff included in the “Standard Bundle” and only wanted Fasthosts’ personal control panel so thought it would be best to ask which package I needed:

Massively long delay before a response finally comes

Great! They’ve removed the control panels I highlighed (and only those ones!) but they were just the ones in the next month! In fairness, after a few more emails I did get the past invoices refunded as well as a fair few future ones taken off the account but it makes me very concerned as to who else is still paying this charge... I would never have questioned it as they did send a mailshot out saying they would now be charging for them etc. Most odd

Conversation 2 – SQL Server Express

As I’ve already mentioned, we’ve been with Fasthosts for around 8 years now (that’s at least £7k in the basic fees in case you’re interested) and for most of that we’ve had use of a shared SQL Server. When we signed up it was SQL Server 7 and although we’ve requested it nicely we’ve never been upgraded and so it resides on a very outdated machine to which we cannot connect using the new SQL Management studio.

This shared SQL Server costs us £35pm and as we’ve only got 3 active clients using it, bringing in a total of £300pa I felt that is a slight waste of money so my plan was to use SQL Server Express in place (they’re relatively low traffic sites and MS Access was out of the question as they made use of various stored procedures).

As you now have to pay extra for an ASP.Net account I thought I’d ask support to find out what the situation was...

I felt that was direct and straight to the point, not asking anything too complicated to which one may expect a yes/no answer? Right?...

Ok, I know sometimes I’m a little slow but “appropriate authentication method” that had me seriously confused, the only thing I could think was he was referring to Management Studio. Not only that I know for a fact that we’re on SQL Server 7…

Ok, so perhaps my question wasn't clear enough, I thought that's what I asked, I thought (clearly incorrectly) that SQL Server Express was now released as a standard update through Microsoft updates -so they've disabled that. Perhaps I should have been a little clear in pointing out the fact that I HAVE a shared SQL Server account with them and that it was unsatisfactory but hey I thought they'd check what services we already had with them.

Ok, so as this point you can tell I was slowly quickly loosing grip but this next one just finishes me off...

Feel like you’re on a roundabout? I gave up and spent the weekend fast-forwarding my server transfer schedule.

Ok, looking at those few emails perhaps it is a bit extreme to close down our account with them but this is a monthly occurrence, I would say all in all this set of emails took around 2 hours of my day which to me is time I could be billing a client so I think it’s justified.

As it happens they did me a favour, by forcing my hand (or annoying me to the extent I did something about it) we're now finally on Rackspace and our sites are a lot more speedy :) Happy Days!

When customer service goes mad

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Tags: Business | Random | The Site Doctor

 Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Give your site a pulse

Get your finger on the pulse of your site with this great new (free) RSS statistics service “PulseRSS”. I met the developers of PulseRSS the other day at my first Multipack meet (West Midlands based new media meet) which, if you’re nearby you should check out in the future as they’re a lovely bunch of guys (and girls apparently but they were no-where to be seen on Saturday).

Back to PulseRSS! As already mentioned, PulseRSS is a statistics service via an RSS/XML feed that works in a very similar way to Google Analytics but unlike Google Analytics, they’ve followed the principle of KISS which I think works really well, the interface is simple and easy to use and have I already mentioned it was free?

So if you’re looking for a simple free statistics package then check out PulseRSS –I’ve got it running on my blog already so it’ll be interesting to see how the stats compare to Google Analytics...

Give your site a pulse

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Tags: JavaScript | SEO | Web Development | WebDD

 Monday, March 12, 2007

ASP not running on Windows 2003 with ASP.Net installed

Another post from Doug Setzer from 27Seconds.com :)

At my "day job", the systems guys are building new Windows 2003 servers to upgrade our aging Windows 2000 servers.  The plan is to:
 - Build the new Windows 2003 server
 - Install IIS
 - Install .NET
 - Run the IIS migration tool from the old Win2k server

That all went as well as could go - little things got mixed up and had to be corrected.  But, the server would let you request plain HTML files and ASPX files, but classic ASP pages were returned blank.  In poking around Google and the server, we came to find that we had to enable ASP content via:
 - IIS Manager
 - Web Services Extensions
 - Specifically allow Active Server Pages

But, we were still having the same issues.  Stopping and restarting IIS didn't help. Nor did a server reboot.

I found a blog post that mentioned checking that the ASP ISAPI has the correct path.  It tried a random thought that Microsoft has changed the default name of the "Windows"/"Winnt" folder -- Windows NT4, 2000, etc. all use "Winnt", where as Windows 2003 uses the "Windows" folder.  Sure enough, double checking the path to the ASP ISAPI had the wrong path and fixing this path fixed our issues with classic ASP files.

ASP not running on Windows 2003 with ASP.Net installed

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Tags: ASP | ASP.Net | IIS | Web Development

 Friday, March 09, 2007

Accessing properties by a string name

This morning Julian Voelcker came to me with an interesting issue that I’ve looked into before but I’ve never really looked into a re-useable solution. Seeing as it’s fun Friday I thought why not ;)

The scenario: I would like to offer my users a custom mail merge facility where by they can insert values stored in the database such as their name. The selection of columns is unlikely to be changed and if it does then I’ll be the one to do it. There are about 20 fields to choose from.

Easy enough, in the past I’ve kept it to a minimum and then just done a simple find and replace on the body i.e.:

//Create a dataset and add some test columns
DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("Name");
dt.Columns.Add("Email");

Add some test data

#region Add some test data

DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["Name"] = "Julian";
dr["Email"] = "julian@email.com";
dt.Rows.Add(dr);

dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["Name"] = "Tim";
dr["Email"] = "tim@email.com";
dt.Rows.Add(dr);

#endregion

Create the example email body

#region Create the example email body

string emailBody = "<p>This is a test email to {{Name}} that would be sent to the email address: {{Email}}.</p>";

#endregion

Do the work

#region Do the work

//Loop through the rows
for (int i = 0; i < dt.Rows.Count; i++)

{...}

{
    //Get the data row for this instance
    DataRow row = dt.Rows[i];

    //Create a new body as this'll be updated for each user
    string body = String.Empty;

    //Update the body
    body = emailBody.Replace("##Name##", row["Name"]);
    body = body.Replace("##Email##", row["Email"]);

    litOutput.Text += String.Format("{0}<hr />", body);
}

#endregion

The issue I see with this however is (among others) having 20 fields is a lot to be doing with a find/replace statement as it wouldn’t be very elegant and a nightmare to manage. Sticking with this method of using a dataset I suggested we use a regular expression to match the field delimiters and do a replace that way:

//Create a dataset and add some test columns
DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("Name");
dt.Columns.Add("Email");

Add some test data

#region Add some test data

DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["Name"] = "Julian";
dr["Email"] = "julian@email.com";
dt.Rows.Add(dr);

dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["Name"] = "Tim";
dr["Email"] = "tim@email.com";
dt.Rows.Add(dr);

#endregion

Create the example email body

#region Create the example email body

string emailBody = "<p>This is a test email to {{Name}} that would be sent to the email address: {{Email}}.</p>";

#endregion

Do the work

#region Do the work

//Loop through the rows
for (int i = 0; i < dt.Rows.Count; i++)

{...}

{
    //Get the data row for this instance
    DataRow row = dt.Rows[i];

    MatchEvaluator replaceField = delegate(Match m)

    {...};

    {
        return row[m.Groups[1].ToString()].ToString();
    };

    //Create a new body as this'll be updated for each user
    string body = String.Empty;
    //Find the fields
    Regex r = new Regex(@"{{(\w{0,15}?)}}");
    body = r.Replace(emailBody, replaceField);

    litOutput.Text += String.Format("{0}<hr />", body);
}

#endregion

This is alright and in many ways very scaleable. I’m not a fan of DataSets but in this instance it works nicely and does mean expanding the available fields at a later date would just be a matter of adding columns to the query.

How does this relate to accessing a property of an object using a string value instead? Well there was a catch, Julian wasn’t using a DataSet and didn’t want to, he had a collection of custom objects all ready and waiting. As he uses a code generator to generate his Data Access Layer and Business Logic Layer there was a method already exposed allowing you to search for a property by string but it's not a standard .Net method so I decided to work out how it was done.

The solution it turned out was a really rather elegant solution IMHO. Using reflection you can use the same concept as above but with custom objects and Robert is your father’s wife’s sister:

Reflection.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Reflection.aspx.cs" Inherits="Reflection" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
    <title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        <h1>Reflection Demo</h1>
        <p>Choose from the following fields to build up your email message, the valid fields are (you can choose whether to use non-valid fields as a test if you like):</p>
        <ul>
            <li>Id</li>
            <li>Email</li>
            <li>Name</li>
            <li>JoinedDate</li>
        </ul>
        <p><asp:CheckBox ID="chkCaseSensitive" runat="server" Text="Make the property search case insensitive" /></p>
        <p><label for="txtEmailBody">Example email body:</label><br />
        <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtEmailBody" TextMode="MultiLine" style="width: 500px; height: 200px;" /></p>
        <p><small>HTML submissions are not allowed and they're encoded anyways so no point in spamming -not that you were going to of course!</small></p>
        <p><asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnSubmit" Text="Merge It!" OnClick="btnSubmit_Click" /></p>
        <asp:Literal ID="litOutput" runat="server" />
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Reflection.aspx.cs

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Collections;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Reflection;

public class TestObject

{...}

{
    private int __Id;
    private string __Name;
    private string __Email;
    private DateTime __JoinedDate;

    public int Id

    {...}

    {
        get

        {...}

        {
            return __Id;
        }

        set

        {...}

        {
            __Id = value;
        }

    }

    public string Name

    {...}

    {
        get

        {...}

        {
            return __Name;
        }

        set

        {...}

        {
            __Name = value;
        }

    }

    public string Email

    {...}

    {
        get

        {...}

        {
            return __Email;
        }

        set

        {...}

        {
            __Email = value;
        }

    }

    public DateTime JoinedDate

    {...}

    {
        get

        {...}

        {
            return __JoinedDate;
        }

        set

        {...}

        {
            __JoinedDate = value;
        }

    }

    public TestObject(int id, string name, string email, DateTime joinedDate)

    {...}

    {
        __Id = id;
        __Name = name;
        __Email = email;
        __JoinedDate = joinedDate;
    }

    public bool GetPropertyValueByName(string propertyName)

    {...}

    {
        object obj = null;
        return this.GetPropertyValueByName(propertyName, false, ref obj);
    }

    public bool GetPropertyValueByName(string propertyName, ref object val)

    {...}

    {
        return this.GetPropertyValueByName(propertyName, false, ref val);
    }

    public bool GetPropertyValueByName(string propertyName, bool caseInsensitive, ref object val)

    {...}

    {
        PropertyInfo p = null;
        BindingFlags flags = BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic;

        //If it's a case-insensitive search then add the flag
        if (caseInsensitive)
            flags = flags | BindingFlags.IgnoreCase;

        p = this.GetType().GetProperty(
               propertyName,
               flags,
               null,
               null,
               Type.EmptyTypes,