Oh what a tangled web we weave...

...when officialdom gets hold of paying one's staff!

As a new employer, I received a bumper pack full of information and forms from HM Revenue.

Thankfully I know my way round payroll. But I could imagine that anyone who'd never seen all these forms before would be completely at sea. Umpteen forms called P-this and P-that. A big flow chart to work out which NIC table you should be using.

Why do people make life so complicated for themselves? HM Revenue are people. So people made these forms up for other people to fill in. Argh!

And when I came to load the CD-ROM and run the calculations...

I got the CD-ROM loaded on my computer and opened it. Then looked for somewhere to put in the company and employee details.

Instinctive it wasn't.

In the end, I found it under "Database", which would be the last place I'd have thought of looking - I'd have thought the Database would contain things like NIC tables and tax rates and codes.

Once I'd found where to put the details in, entering them went quite smoothly.

Has anyone else tried using the HMRC CD-ROM? What's your experience of it been?

M