Tax Time

[Aggie]

Doing my taxes tonight (a fun Friday night  eh, I did some last night), and while reviewing my summary I realized the 'rent' I owe for living and working in this country is the same as I paid for my apartment last year. 

Pretty good deal, when you think about it.  Alternatively, my apartment is too damned expensive (moving at the end of the month).

[Opsa]

Not bad!

We get our taxes over with in March, usually. It's no fun, but at least we can send them by internet. In the old days it was all paper and snail mail, which only added to the drudgery.

[Griffin NoName]

Our tax returns are September for snailmail and January for internet, though the actual tax year is April. I already got my tax form for next year but it will sit around.

[Aggie]

Ayuh, did the forms using an online service, and had it submitted the same night.  The refund will magically appear in my bank account soon.  I would have owed a little money but I maxed out my RRSP, so I get a very nice chunk of change back. 

[Opsa]

We always spend our chunk of change paying back what we've borrowed. At least it helps us catch up, but some year I'd like to be able to travel a bit.

[Lindorm]

My dear beloved wmployer decided to switch over to a new computer system for scheduling, timekeeping and handling of salaries last year. Most of us at the sharp end of the business, in the operating departments, have salaries that have a fixed component (your basic monthly wages) and several non-fixed components that can vary from month to month. For example, we get an unsocial hours compensation, paid on the basis of the actual amount of unsocial hours worked in a month, I get a special Instructor's compensation every calenadar day I have a trainee driver and so on. Thus, our monthly salary specifications can become quite complex and a bit difficult to keep track of. Not to mention any overtime worked...

Now, the new, magnificent, HR system (SAP HR) , supposed to take care of all that, and do it with much more fanfare, flair and pretty user interface as compared to our boring (but never failing) old legacy mainframe systems had but one small problem: It didn't work. People went absolutely batshit crazy having to constantly contact the salary office to get their salaries corrected -and the poor bastards at the salary office were completely overwhelmed by the increase in their workload and broke down, themselves.

And now, it turned out that due to some sort of amazing gremlins-with consultancy fees, the company has not transferred the correct figures to the inland revenue folks. I was only reported to earn about half of what I have actually earned last year, and was supposed to get a huuuge tax refund due to me having paid way too much taxes last year. Tempting as it was to argue good faith, take the windfall and run, I have instead had to manually correct tons of figures and do my own tax calculations. I am sorely tempted to bill my employer for  overtime, by the way.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Wait, are you telling me that a SAP implementation didn't work?!?! I'm baffled!! That's not supposed to happen, EVER!!!!!

I should be a SAP consultant. I would be loaded and have work until forever. I've heard rumors about successful implementations of SAP, but to this day I haven't seen/known one directly.

[Lindorm]

My mother is a senior project manager in the Swedish IT industry, more specifically on the telecomms side. When she heard that my employer was switching over to a SAP system, her comment was "Get another job somewhere else".

Our old mainframe systems are decidedly un-sexy and un-snazzy, and can be a bit of a handful to come to terms with at first, but once you get used to them, they are very powerful, fast and they work, day in and day out.

Personally, I suspect that successful SAP implementations are a bit like immaculate conceptions. Nifty concept, but not exactly a day-to-day occurence. 

[Aggie]

I used to work at a company that used SAP, but was too cheap to buck up for any decent user interfaces.


We didn't need to say 'Cheers!' when we went for drinks, the most common toast was "F*ck SAP!"

[Griffin NoName]

I did my accounts, ready for the tax form I never fill in til September. I am so way ahead of myself! Feels very strange. Still, there's still plenty of other figures to accumulate before I am actually ready to complete the tax form.

I think I was encouraged by this thread.