.png){kind=small}
Your Taxes in Moola: What It Shows You, and What We Left Out
Moola can now read a tax return you have already filed, in the UK, in Germany, or wherever else you pay, and turn it into a picture of what you actually paid. This post is about what that gives you, and about one number we decided not to show you.
Start with a return you have already filed
Upload the return or assessment as a PDF. Moola reads it, which takes about a minute, shows you the figures it found, and you confirm or correct them before anything is kept. The figures you approve become a year on the page. The document itself is deleted the moment you confirm.
That order matters more than it sounds. Nothing is stored from a reading you have not checked, and the PDF does not sit on a server afterwards.
What is owed comes first
Everything else on a tax record is history. Your obligations are the only part with a deadline, so they sit at the top of the record rather than three scrolls down.
A Self Assessment return often carries two payments on account, due at different times, on top of any balancing payment. They are easy to forget precisely because they are not part of the return you just filed.
If the filing does not state a due date, Moola says so rather than inventing one.
A loss is shown with what it can be set against
This is the part we are most pleased with.
"Carried forward: £6,750" invites you to assume it offsets whatever you like. It usually does not. A loss pot has a scope, and the scope is most of the meaning, so every pot now carries one sentence saying what it can be set against: chargeable gains only, the same property business only, private disposal gains only, and so on.
A figure without its scope is worse than no figure. It reads as money you have, when it is money you can only use in one particular place.
And where the return does not say, Moola says exactly that: "What this can be set against is not stated on the filing." That is a real answer, not a gap. The alternative is a guess set in the same typeface as a fact.
Years, across countries, lined up properly
If you pay tax in more than one place, the years do not line up. The UK runs 6 April to 5 April. Germany runs the calendar year. Most tools either ignore this or quietly average it away.
Moola aligns each year to the tax-year convention of the country it belongs to, and a year from another country sits where most of it falls. Where amounts need converting for comparison, it uses that tax year's own exchange rate, the average of the European Central Bank's daily reference rates across the year, and it keeps every figure in its original currency in the list underneath. The conversion is for the chart, never for the record.
What Moola deliberately does not do
The tempting number here is the one we left out: how much tax a given action would save you.
It is arithmetic. We could compute it tomorrow. We have not, and we are not going to, because a number whose only purpose is to make the case for an action is a recommendation wearing a number's clothes. Once it is on the screen, the product has an opinion about what you should do with your money, and we are not the right party to have one.
So the line is drawn explicitly, in the module's own header:
"Days until this lot is tax-free" is arithmetic. "Sell in January" is advice.
What it will state: the deadline and how far off it is. Your own loss pots and what each can be set against. What you owe, and when. What a filing actually said.
What it will never say: what to sell, when, what to realise, which option is better, or how much tax an action would save.
There is a test in our codebase called WHAT IT WILL NOT SAY. It fails the build on the words recommend, suggest, should and consider, on any field shaped like a tax saving, and on any totalled relief figure. Restraint that relies on everyone remembering is not restraint. This one is wired to the build, so it survives us.
One more thing we got wrong first
An early version of the year-end work had a field called "daysShortOfWindow", measuring how far a disposal fell short of a holding period.
Then someone on the team pointed out that they had sold inside that window on purpose. Inside the window, a loss is recognised. Hold past it and the disposal becomes tax-free, which for a loss means the loss disappears. Our field name had quietly filed a deliberate, correct decision under "mistake".
It is now a measurement rather than a shortfall, and the consequence is stated without being ranked. A country with no such rule on file gets no verdict at all, because "not recorded" is not the same as "outside".
We mention it because it is the whole design brief in miniature. Tell people what is true about their own position. Do not grade it.
Where this leaves you
Moola does not provide regulated tax or financial advice, and the tax module is not trying to. Everything in it is information drawn from your own confirmed filings, for you to take to your adviser or your tax authority. What it adds is that the information is finally in one place, in the right currencies, with the deadlines at the top and the scope attached to every number.
If you have filed a return, you can put it in and see your own version of the screens above.
Comments