Virgin says "computer says no"

Yesterday morning. M at the station ready to travel to Edinburgh once she had collected her ticket from the pre-pay machine, having bought it with a credit card on the fab Raileasy website.

Looks in rucksack... coat pocket... no wallet and therefore no credit card, debit card, cash or anything.

Panics.

Remembers she left wallet in pocket of other coat the previous night.

Stops panicking and hopes that nice lady behind the counter can issue her ticket given she (M) knows the booking reference number (written in her diary) and all the details of the journey.

Nice lady says no because computer says it must have the credit card that made the booking.

Nice lady also says "please let me finish" when M was not aware she had interrupted in the middle of a sentence. (Middle of a paragraph maybe but humans do not always have to deliver a pre-prepared speech.)

M cannot travel to Edinburgh.

M has to phone husband and get him to come to the station with cash to buy another ticket.

Husband arrives just as train leaves - without M on it.

M is late for work and cross with Virgin Trains. "Computer says no" is a feeble excuse for bad customer service.

WiFi on the train

Now that I'm travelling up and down to Edinburgh several times a week, I'm trying to find out whether I can access the internet on the train (mobile broadband dongle is hopeless on the train because the reception is so poor).

Virgin have WiFi on their Pendolino trains. But the trains that run between Carlisle and Edinburgh are SuperVoyagers which don't yet have WiFi.

Virgin say on their website that this will be available in "Summer 2009". OK, it's now November. That's not summer by any stretch of the imagination.

The other trains that run between Carlisle and Edinburgh are First TransPennine Express trains.

So I asked both these train companies about WiFi. For Virgin, it was "what is the updated timescale for putting WiFi on SuperVoyager trains?" and for TransPennine, it was, "are you planning to put WiFi on your trains?"

That was about 2 weeks ago.

TransPennine have since said "no - but we do have power sockets at every table". What good that's going to do me when I'm trying to access the Internet I do not know :-)

And Virgin haven't replied yet. Black mark for customer service there.

Gold Star-bucks - and a raspberry for mobile broadband

In a (WiFiless) Carlisle cafe this morning wanting to catch up with work e-mails before going to visit a client, so I plugged my dongle in.

3Connect mobile broadband said it wanted to download an update, so I let it... and what did it do?

Uninstalled itself, that's what.

Grrr.

And there was me with work to do and not time to drive the 10 miles home and back again to pick up the installation info.

So I guessed that a chain cafe would be my best option for WiFi and went round the corner to Starbucks.

They have WiFi. Good point. It's complimentary if you put £2 on a Starbucks card. Brilliant point.

So I registered for that.

And now it looks like I can use WiFi at any Starbucks I like (and there's plenty of them), on unlimited visits to Starbucks in the UK and Ireland (so long as I buy a drink at each visit of course), on any computer. It doesn't matter if I have my work Mac or my PC netbook with me. No software to download, unlike the 3Connect.

Looking good.

Winds of change!

As you may have seen on FreeAgent's company blog, I'm very happy to have joined their team as their tame accountant.

So the content of this blog will change a bit going forward.

I'm going to keep away from writing about accounting software and other accounting matters here.

But I am still keen to write about customer service and so I'm going to keep this blog on to write about that.

I'm also going to start a new foodie blog, because my husband Matt and I love cooking and eating good food. And we also love checking out bed-and-breakfasts. So once I've decided on a snappy title for that blog, I'll put it up here.

UPDATE: The blog is called "Great British Food and B&B's" and you can find it here.

Dennis Howlett would be proud of me - he had to give me a great deal of encouragement to make me take up blogging, but now I've started, I can't stop. It's addictive :-)

Multi-level application from Xero

Xero have announced that they're migrating from a "one-size-fits-all" software application to a multi-level application.

Put simply, smaller businesses can now pay a reduced fee (here in the UK that would be £12 per month instead of £19 per month), but any customers paying that reduced fee can only enter 5 sales invoices per month, 5 purchase invoices per month, and 20 bank transactions per month.

And businesses that need multi-currency would pay £24 a month.

Reading the comments, I think these prices apply to new users signing up after 11th October 2009. Existing users would continue to get multi-currency as part of their package.

I'm not sure what I think about that.

In principle I'm all for paying for only what you need. It wouldn't make sense to pay for stock control if you're running a service-based business, for example. But I'm not sure I like how Xero have chosen to draw the boundaries.

Certainly I'm not sure that capping the number of transactions for micro businesses is a very good idea. Some small businesses would fit comfortably, for example a small IT contractor who has only 1 or 2 customers and sells his/her own services so has very few purchase invoices. But others would not. My own company quite often has more than 5 sales invoices to issue a month. I'd be snookered for the smallest plan if I were on Xero.

And I'm also not convinced that multi-currency is such an optional extra any more. Ask me a few years ago and I'd have said yes. But plenty more businesses now have customers abroad who have to be invoiced in their own currency. Not all overseas businesses are happy to be invoiced in £ sterling. I've had to issue 2 invoices in US dollars before now. That means I'd also be snookered for the medium plan on Xero. I'd have to pay £24 a month instead of £12. That's an extra £144 a year. Which, for a small business, is not to be (atishoo)* sneezed at.

Personally, I prefer FreeAgent's pricing structure, whereby the monthly amount paid is determined by whether your business is a sole trader, partnership/LLP, or limited company. It's 99.9% certain that a limited company will need to be able to produce dividend vouchers, and a sole trader won't - so they're in for a company and out for a sole trader.

Disclosure: FreeAgent is a customer of mine.

* Yes, I really do say "atishoo" when I sneeze. Honest.

Staff earning tips - did you know...

From CCH's latest e-CPD update (summarised in my own words):

If you're working in a restaurant / bar / bistro, and tips are paid to you directly by the restaurant / bar / bistro's customers, you have to declare that income on a Self Assessment Tax Return every year and pay tax to HM Revenue.

But if your employer collects all the tips and shares them out between you and your colleagues, the employer has to operate PAYE on the tip money, so you don't have to worry about it.

And if someone other than your employer collects the tips and shares them out, that person may be a "troncmaster" who counts as an employer in his/her own right and so has to operate PAYE.

And the National Insurance gets even more complicated.

Crikey... and the bar staff are probably only trying to earn a few quid to help them get through university without a gi-normous student loan debt to pay off.

Why does it have to be so complicated?

Because declare any income tax-free and you run the risk of other income being falsely declared as that - and other complications. For example:

If tips were tax-free... then restaurateurs would pay their staff NMW (because they have to)... and anything else paid to staff would be classified as tips... and then the staff would have a job to get a mortgage because their P60 would show only a fraction of their income... and you're in a Gordian knot.

So in this case, perhaps it is easier to say that if staff collect their own tips, they must declare that as self-assessment income. But I hope that restaurateurs who let their staff do that, warn them that they have to do tax returns...

And here's why the tax system needs simplification

I was doing some research for a client into Inheritance Tax and happened upon the exemption for gifts in consideration of marriage or civil partnership.

HMRC's website explains how much parents, other relatives, and anyone else, can give a couple when they marry, without the gift being counted as part of the giver's estate for Inheritance Tax.

What made my eyes pop was that the gift has to be promised "on or shortly before the date of the ceremony" to qualify for the exemption.

It can be paid over before or after the ceremony, but it must be promised before the ceremony or the exemption won't apply.

That astonishes me. What if, for example, an aged grandparent suffering from Alzheimer's Disease remembers only when the newlyweds visit her after the honeymoon that she hasn't told them about the money she plans to give them? That gift would not qualify for exemption.

It's also such a pettifogging little rule. I can't honestly see what difference it makes if the gift is promised before or after the ceremony, in logical terms.

But then, who said tax was logical.