We’re approaching the middle of the year; it’s June and even in Hamburg the sun is shining. In keeping with the weather, the hsp development team has some more sunny news to share. A number of features have been implemented, and – as usual – plenty more are in the pipeline. Paul would like to showcase some of them live. Let’s get started.

On Monday this week (30 May), we received a message from the Elster development team. The final version of the Elster Rich Client is finally available. This is required to submit the tax assessment returns. Although the tool will be integrated into Opti.Tax Grundsteuer in advance, the tax authorities have already announced that their servers will not accept the declarations until 1 July. hsp is currently scrutinising the ERiC once again. Have there been any changes to the data set? Only once no further updates are required will the tool be integrated into Opti.Tax, possibly as early as the next release, 22.0.7. Updates on this will be announced on hsp’s social media channels.

The mandatory field check will definitely be updated. If the button with the star is clicked in Opti.Tax, only the mandatory fields specified by the tax authorities remain. However, until now, the check has not been applied to the sub-fields of a mandatory field. As a result, it was possible for important mandatory details to be missing without the validation filter being triggered. The mandatory fields are now being cross-checked against the specifications in ERiC and updated. The validation messages are also being adjusted accordingly.

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Improvements right down to the last detail

Next topic: the forms for the declarations of assessment. The form for the federal model is finalised, as is the one for Bavaria. Hesse is not expected to be able to provide a document until 1 July. The tax authorities want a fully digital process, which presents a number of challenges. To begin with, the form for the federal model will be integrated; the particular issue here is that the form does not contain a corresponding field for every item in the Elster data set. This means that a separate document must be created as an annex, in which this additional information is listed.

The signature field for client authorisation is located on the form. For those regional models where no forms have yet been made available, the question therefore arises as to how client approval can be obtained. It is not yet possible to answer this question. hsp is in contact with the tax authorities to find a solution to this problem as soon as possible.

Next, Paul discusses the Opti.Tax Cloud . New features in the Cloud include the menu options „Email Templates“ and „Email Template Building Blocks“. The reason for this is that many clients do not trust emails sent automatically by the software, as these do not clearly reveal the sender at first glance. It is therefore now possible to customise each email individually. This is done via the „Email Templates“ option. Every single email sent via the system is listed there. The signature for the emails can be customised under „Email Template Building Blocks“. The editor there uses HTML, so a tool such as wordtohtml.net should be used to convert a customised signature into HTML code. The code can be pasted directly into the Opti.Tax Cloud signature editor.

Opti.Tax Property Tax remains the most flexible solution

A new and very useful feature is the ability for a collaborator on the client side to forward a task to an external collaborator. Previously, tasks could only be forwarded to another person who also held the role of „client employee“ (actually: client employee). The function can be found in the Cloud, on the left-hand side of the menu, under „Properties“, then „Assignee“ (actually: Assignee).

The issue of property tax and property tax reform is extremely agile. hsp is, and remains, by far the most agile choice when it comes to developing operational property tax software. The whole team contributes to this, as do all the partners and law firms who provide hsp’s development team with valuable feedback. As a result, Opti.Tax Property Tax is evolving into an increasingly powerful tool for meeting the immense demands of the property tax reform. Just as hsp’s long-standing partners have come to expect from other areas such as procedural documentation, transfer pricing documentation or anti-money laundering.