I understand the position with regards to HMRC and submitting forms and the restrictions they place on number of characters. We’ve had this with other software providers and can accept this. However, my point is that this shouldn’t affect the whole of the IRIS suite, product range.
For example, we’ve invested time and money getting IRIS Automail configured to work for all clients. However, if I was to do an Automail letter in IRIS (i.e. nothing to do with HMRC) for a Trust with a long name, an incorrect client name would be picked up and would have to be corrected manually. If I’m then doing letter for multiple Trust clients e.g. information request questionnaire, then any Trust with a name longer than 40 characters would be incorrect and again have to be manually corrected. We pay a lot of money for the software and I feel uncomfortable having to reply on people to spot and correct these types of issues.
I can fully understand there needing to be a restriction in terms of what appears on the actual forms (which are then submitted to HMRC). However I can’t understand why I can’t enter the clients legal name to be used elsewhere e.g. Automail, Time & Fees, Data Mining reports etc.
We don’t use Time and Fees in IRIS but if we did, would this restriction mean an incorrect name would appear on the Fee note?
Alan Taylor
Looking at this problem from what is possibly a slightly different angle, we have quite a number of clients with long names, so have entered both the shortened version and the long version in our database.
Given that there is the shortened version, why on earth does Iris not use this short name when preparing tax returns? We have to remove the long name, save the client record, generate and submit the tax return, and then change the full name back to what it was - and the short name has been there all along!
This is an enhancement. We will review this issue and prioritize it accordingly with other items in our backlog.