Frequently Asked Questions

Alphatax Corporate Tax hosted is, our 30-year old product, hosted in a Citrix environment so that customers can access it via the internet.

The latest version of Alphatax Corporate Tax is available via cloud. We’ve listened to, and acted on, customer feedback to ensure what we’re building in the cloud version will provide the best CT user experience possible. In short, we’ve re-engineered Alphatax Corporate Tax to deliver new and enhanced features which will give you increased control, visibility and efficiencies across the CT compliance process and ultimately make your lives easier.

All versions of Alphatax Corporate Tax have the same trusted tax logic, but with cloud you’ll immediately spot it has a familiar but fresh, more intuitive look and feel so you can be up and running straight away.

We have no plans to stop support for any version of Alphatax Corporate Tax. We will continue to ensure that they remain compliant with all current and future tax changes from HMRC.

Alphatax adheres to an End-Of-Life policy which documents the requirements for EOL for all our software, subscriptions and services. The purpose is to help manage the EOL transitions and to explain the role we can play in helping to migrate to alternative Alphatax products. For more detail please see:

End of life policy

Yes, our support team is responsible for supporting all versions of Alphatax Corporate Tax, so you will still be served by our same team of UK-based, tax experts. In addition, we have set-up a dedicated team within the business responsible for switching you, so you’ll be in safe hands.

With the cloud version of Alphatax Corporate Tax, you will no longer need to manage updates yourself or through your IT team. Any compliance updates and new features to the product will be applied automatically as they become available so you can take advantage of them immediately.

No, the on-premise and hosted versions inevitably have some limitations in terms of which features we can introduce due to the age of the technology it’s been built upon. For example, these versions are unable to support new collaborative ways of working in the same way that the cloud version of Alphatax Corporate Tax can. These limitations restrict the potential for future new features and enhancements.

No, we have no plans to stop Alphatax Corporate Tax being available to new customers. In fact, Tax Systems is the only enterprise corporate tax provider that gives customers the option of cloud, on-premise or hosted versions.

The cloud version is available now and already has more than 50 customers. As it’s a SaaS product, there are monthly releases with additional enhancements and features. Our customer readiness team will work with each customer to agree the best time to move over to cloud.

The UK was our launch market for Alphatax cloud, reflecting where the largest proportion of our corporate tax customer base is today. We know there is strong interest from our customers in Ireland and the UAE, and extending Alphatax cloud availability to additional regions is very much on our future roadmap. We will of course share updates as our plans evolve.

We have developed a systemised migration process. Once the paperwork is signed, and your migration slot scheduled, our migration team will take you through the process. As you can imagine we are seeing a lot of interest, so if you do have a preferred month, we do recommend that you book early.

We will run a test in both versions as part of the migration process that will check that all data and calculations match in both systems. On successful completion of this test you will be able to see a Certificate for each computation in the product that attests to this fact.

Mainly the .CTX files (which are the company files), and if you use Group, the .GTX files. There are also bespoke system files (if you have them) e.g., Compliance Process (tcsl.prg) or mapping files (.MPAA / .MPF) if you use Accounts integration.

Our migration team will be able to take you through all of this.

Yes, SSO is available with the cloud version of Alphatax Corporate Tax.

Alphatax uses Azure AD. Azure AD supports a number of widely used protocols including Open ID Connect and SAML.

Yes, the tax logic is identical in all versions of Alphatax Corporate Tax.

Data security is everything – you need to know that your data, (and your customers’ data) is safe. Alphatax take this responsibility seriously, which is why we’re ISO27001 accredited, and Cyber Essentials certified. All data is processed and stored using Microsoft Azure’s primary and secondary onshore data centres, so it never leaves the UK.

With on-prem, all the processes such as maintenance, security and updates are done in-house by your IT team. They’ll maintain and manage all servers and databases at a cost to your business.

With cloud, we do all of that for you, freeing-up IT time and resources, so your IT team can focus on more strategic priorities.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs are essentially connectors which make it easier to plug one solution or application into another. These interfaces allow software solutions to communicate with each other more easily. APIs enable other systems to push data into, or pull data from, Alphatax cloud. This means that we can integrate much more closely with existing solutions (e.g. ERP, Finance System, workflow etc.) in your technology ecosystem, which means you can always choose best-of-breed.

Just like for all of our hosted and SaaS products, Alphatax is considered the processor, with the customer (the controller) remaining the owner of the data.

A10 the cloud version of Alphatax Corporate Tax is delivered via Software-as-a-Service, with the purpose of Alphatax agreed between Alphatax and the Alphatax Corporate Tax customers. Alphatax does not use the information uploaded into Alphatax Corporate Tax for other purposes outside that agreed with the customer. Under these conditions, the ICO defined Alphatax as the data ‘processor’ and the customer is the ‘data controller’. For more information see the definition of controllers and processors used by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) along with their official guidance for controllers and processors, which is followed by Alphatax.

Yes, you will be able to access Alphatax Corporate Tax securely from any device with a web-browser.

Alphatax Corporate Tax is browser agnostic and tested in Chrome, Safari and Edge.

Your tax data is always backed-up and secure. We provide multi-site data resilience, with data hosted at Microsoft Azure’s primary and secondary data centres, both of which are located in the UK.

Data is backed-up in a single tenant database, encrypted at rest and in transit. Alphatax is ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials certified.

Alphatax is both ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials certified. ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security. Cyber Essentials is a UK Government backed scheme and overseen by the National Cyber Security Centre.

Security is baked into our platform at all levels and monitored by a 24/7 Security Operation Centre (SOC). A SOC is a team of IT security professionals that monitors the IT environment to detect cybersecurity events in real time and address them as quickly and effectively as possible.

Your tax data is always backed-up and secure. Data is stored in a single tenant database which means that there is no sharing of the database with other clients. As your IT team will expect, the data is encrypted at all times.

Alphatax Corporate Tax sits on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft invests massively in data security, its core to their business. On-prem solutions typically can’t match these levels of security because of the costs and IT expertise required.

Alphatax maintains a comprehensive Disaster Recovery capability, so we can restore access to Alphatax Corporate Tax in the cloud for customers in the event of a major incident.

Yes, as a separate module (as it is currently with Alphatax Corporate Tax).

Yes, reviews were an area customers asked us to focus on. Review notes were not that widely used in Alphatax and therefore we wanted to make improvements to support customers’ use of them.

We therefore took the decision to re-imagine review notes to make them much more user friendly. In practice they’ll work much like Microsoft Office with “@mentions”, and will be easy to access, integrated with workflow & reporting and will provide more contextual information. This will help to streamline the review process.

Every field you work in is saved separately and automatically every time you move off or tab to another field. So, the chance of you losing any work is extremely low. This is a big improvement on Alphatax today, where if you get hit with the blue screen before saving your work, it will be lost.

Yes, we understand that different Advisory Firms work in different ways; office by office or team by team. You will be able to set your approach in the product at an administrative level in the same way that you do at present.