e-filing... was this useful???

I started thinking of this only on July 31 when one of my friends was prepared to pay the interest for overshooting the July 31, 2008 timeline of filing the returns. He was relaxed until then and only on July 31 (at about 8 PM) did he realize that he should have filed it by today... His major problem was that he even had to pay Self Assessment Tax.

I could see the beauty of e-filing only now. It took all about 30 minutes to complete the returns through the Skorydov website. Of course NSDL also provides the option to submit Self Assessment Tax online and these together ensured that my friend could complete his returns online by July 31, 2008 although office hours were long completed.

In retrospect, I also filed through the same site and I also finished the same in about 15 minutes flat, which is great considering that I took about 2 hours to fill the returns form two years ago in addition to which I had to endure wrong calculations and finally had to submit a revised form "after" the due date at that time. The Skorydov site greatly helps in this area since it does ask the individual to search as to which ITR he/she needs to fill. It has a set of questions based on which the software gives you easy to fill fields which can be directly extracted from Form-16 etc. In all, I must say that the Skorydov software is excellent and easy to use.

Being a IT professional, e-filing this year has helped me save a lot of time in terms of both having to sit with a CA and file the returns as well as to run behind them to ensure that the returns are filed and done correctly... since at the end of the day, the IT Department does not crucify the CA but me if the returns were not calculated correctly.