If you haven’t been reading and following our advice over the past year, you might be rushing around madly trying to figure out how much you need to invest where to save the maximum amount of tax. And to do that, the first thing you need is to know what your taxable income and your tax liability is.
Thankfully, you don’t have to get your chartered accountant’s help for this—there are ready-to-use software packages that will do everything short of actually filing your return of income.There are also plenty of tax calculators online that will give you at least a rough idea of your tax liability.
Saral ITR is a free software download from Relyon Software. It generates an electronic and fileable paper return for ITR-1, 2 and 3.A registered version of the software is available, and includes all the income tax return forms—ITR-1, ITR-2, ITR-3, ITR-4, ITR-5, ITR-6, ITR-7 and ITR-8. It also allows you to enter data, prepare a paper return and generate XML (electronic return) for all these forms.
A similar package is KITRET from KeyPro. For a little under Rs 7,000 (single user) you get a DOS-based package that computes income tax and provides comprehensive computerised taxation reports. It also comes with return-filing software.
Taxbase (Rs 7,500 single user version) is a more comprehensive package, which includes computation, preparation and filing of paper and electronic returns. Tax professionals will also find features such as the financial statements tracker (which keeps track of balance sheets, profit and loss, trading statements and the like) and the advance tax calculator.
TaxPro IT for 2008-9 (Rs 8,000 single user) offers most of the features as the other software packages. It also allows users to transfer their balance sheets and other financial records generated in Tally.
While software packages are, no doubt, useful, many of their best features might be wasted on most of us.All that we really need is an online calculator that tells us what our tax liability is and how much we’ll have to put away as “tax-saving investments”.
A basic calculator is available on our site. A more detailed version is available at tax.indiainfo.com/taxcalculator/calculator.html. A reasonably exhaustive calculator can be found at moneycontrol.com.
For the self-employed, splurging on the latest gizmos is fun, since most of these can be considered work-related expenses.
All work...
It’s obvious why the following can be claimed as business expenses:
1. PCs and laptops
2. Phones (mobile, landline including cordless)
3. Internet services
4. Back-up devices
...and some play
You can claim these as legitimate expenses provided you do have use for an MP3 player as a data storage device or for a digital camera to take photos for business presentations:
1. MP3 players
2. LCD screens/monitors
3. Digicams and camcorders
4. Video recorders
5. Software accessories
