AAT Level 4 Tax with Carly Barnes


Good evening everyone, and welcome to the latest ASN FREE Q & A session with Carly Barnes from the Norfolk Community Learning Services on AAT Level 4 Tax. If you have any questions, please post as a comment below. Please be aware, if any questions are left unanswered, then they will be answered at a later time. And thank you all for participating…..now over to you, who has the first question?

Natasha Everard's photo.
Comments
Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Evening all! Quite nervous so please be nice! Any questions I’m not able to answer tonight I will find out after the session for you 🙂

Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard Okay, i will ask the first question,….Any tips to remember the sole traders starting to trade tax year rules

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes As in knowing when to tax? The best thing I find always helps my students is to draw out time lines to make it obvious.

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Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard Thank you 🙂

Natasha Everard

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Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard Why is Personal Tax perceived to be the hardest unit of level?? Why do many student fail this unit?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Written questions! Worst answered and there is a lot to remember. Students do not like doing them and put off answering them, which makes them less fluent and confident in the exam.

Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard What are your tips for the written parts of the tax modules?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Quote from AAT – of the four worst answered tasks 2,6,7 & 11 they represent 36% of the exam marks…

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Natasha Everard I think it’s good to create your own written questions and make up your answer to it as well (obviously checking it’s right!) and if you are in a group or have a study person swap them about. It’s about variety with these.

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Another thing that is often done too that when you are asked about certain penalties that you stick to the date they are talking about. Don’t then proceed to list all the penalties if they aren’t relevant. Yes it shows you know them but you aren’t answering the question.

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Natasha Everard
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Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard Rosalyn Carrington do you have a question?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes The Assessment Performance Feedback should be your bible in this as well as you can see where questions aren’t answered very well and avoid making the same mistake.

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Too nice an evening for tax it looks like!

Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard The word TAX has made them all disappear lol

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Haha and the thing is I find it such a relevant unit and it really helps out there in the real world!

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Natasha Everard
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Paula Rutter
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Paula Rutter
Paula Rutter I’m still on level 3 but I’m not sure about the tax exams on level 4. so many people seem to be struggling with them.

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes It’s such a shame as well. We have only ever offered the Taxes as the optionals and rarely get students wanting to do the others. It can be fun and not daunting. If you can master PTAX then BTAX has a lot of crossover.

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Natasha Everard
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Karlene Clissold
Karlene Clissold I am not on the subject yet but when it comes to the exam, will there be a table that you can download or are we suppose to remember? Meaning tax allowances ie, capital gain etc?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes You have a pop up window with Tax Rates and Allowances but you will have to learn Penalties and Deadlines.

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Natasha Everard
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Paula Rutter
Paula Rutter I work in privately owned hotels and they also have property business. which tax module would be more suitable for me ?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Are they Limited?

Paula Rutter
Paula Rutter yeh
3 hotels are Ltd but different names so they run independently same with properties all Ltd.
so I’m assistant to FD with there plan for me to take on more as he steps back to do other ventures. So I should do ptax and Btax ?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes I would definitely do BTAX then. You would probably find PTAX quite easy after that because you cover Sole Traders and Partnerships within BTAX which links into the PTAX.

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes And to be honest the AAT have really gone out there and added over 20 learning resources on the website for PTAX.

Paula Rutter
Paula Rutter so by the time I get there it might be better 😊

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Natasha Everard
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Karlene Clissold
Karlene Clissold Which one would you recommend doing first either PTAX or BTAX first?

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes I think PTAX leads you in gently and prepares you better for BTAX, but then sometimes you have to remember that a business will get slightly different allowances to personal.

Natasha Everard
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Karlene Clissold
Karlene Clissold Does either cover any CIS?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Unfortunately not, it pops up in one of my books but is not examinable.

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes I will just check content for AQ2016 as I know Inheritance Tax is coming in which sadly I am quite excited about! Some of my current students are too and have asked even though done the unit can they learn about it!

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Natasha Everard
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Karlene Clissold
Karlene Clissold That;s probably a relief really – it is quite hard to grasp with all the rulings! Thank you Carly for the advice on doing PTAX first – I am actually looking forward to doing the module once I have got the dreaded Financial Performance out the way!

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Ah yes FNPF 🙂

Natasha Everard
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Sonya Louise
Sonya Louise I have to say I’m quite shocked at how low the national pass rate is for this exam! Students are usually well practiced at written answers by the time they get to this unit. Have you had other feedback from students about this exam?

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Time!! My groups have found that when preparing up some of the computations in the grids that they have to jot it out in rough first so they don’t miss anything. Unfortunately the grids don’t allow you to move everything down in one go if you do miss something.

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes It does then create extra work. I have spoken to the AAT and they are looking at making the AQ2016 ones more user friendly.

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes They were also surprised to find a 3 column tax computation when the majority of practice questions had been a 5 column layout. Make sure you practice both as it can really throw you.

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Sonya Louise
Sonya Louise That’s good. Our pass rates are reasonable but out of all the units this is the lowest. We feel frustrated as we can’t do more than we are without really knowing where people are struggling.

Sonya Louise
Sonya Louise That’s useful to know.

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Yes I try and get as much feedback as I can from them and always worth speaking to the AAT as they are really helpful and helps them to.

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Natasha Everard

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Any questions from anyone currently doing one of the tax units?

Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard Does anyone else have any further questions for Carly this evening?? I have found her answers extremely helpful and insightful.

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Sonya Louise
Sonya Louise Your dedication is fab Natasha Everard. Well done again.

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Natasha Everard
Natasha Everard Okay, so i would like to thank Carly for her time this evening and a great addition to our Q & A sessions. As for all those who have given their time for the Q & A, its quality…not quantity that counts and i really hope that Carly will agree to come back and do another 🙂

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Now I know it’s not too scary happy to do another 🙂As always thanks for setting it up Natasha Everard

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Natasha Everard
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Paula Rutter
Paula Rutter thank you

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Rosalyn Carrington
Rosalyn Carrington Capital gains and how is best to remember ppr

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Argh PPR, thought I had got away with it 🙂

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Again good to draw out timelines so you can see clearly what dates you are working with. Recommend using fingers when counting months so you don’t miss any. And worse case if you forget everything just remember your last 18 months of ownership are exempt.

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Did you have a particular question on capital gains?

Natasha Everard

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Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Well thank you all for asking the questions and hope I was able to answer them for you. I’m about if anyone does think of something later. Enjoy the rest of your evenings! Thanks Natasha Everard 🙂

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Stacey Hampton Bebb
Stacey Hampton Bebb Sorry I missed this, unfortunately the kids were playing up 🙈. I’ve had a quick read through the Q & As and found them very useful, thank you! I’m currently doing Financial Stats but then plan to study PTax & BTax. I hope I’m not going to bite off more than I can chew!

Carly Barnes
Carly Barnes Good luck! After FSTM you will prob find PTAX lovely. It is daunting as its new to a lot of students where at least FSTM follows on but on a whole different level!!