ITR-1 PDF Form Doesn’t Generate Correct XML

In: Finance|Grievances|Internet

25 Jul 2010

All those of you who are filing IT returns online for Assessment Year (A.Y.) 2010-11 using the ITR-1 PDF utility available on the IT Department’s website, please use the Excel ITR-1 utility instead. The PDF utility for A.Y. 2010-11 does not generate the correct XML!!!

And the worst part is, most people will not realise the problem until they have uploaded the XML file and received the ITR-V acknowledgement!

Here are a few problems that I observed:

  1. If you have paid Self-Assessment Tax more than once, all your challans will not be recorded in the XML file generated by the PDF utility, even though you may have mentioned all the challans correctly in the PDF form.

    This can create problems for you, as the IT Dept. may think that you are claiming a higher amount as Self-Assessment Tax paid than what you have given the break-up for.

  2. “Deductions under Chapter VI-A”, “Total income”, “Net tax payable” and “Total tax and interest payable” fields in the XML file are not populated. As a result, the fields are blank even in the ITR-V form (see below image)!

    In my view, this is quite outrageous! The ITR-V is an important document which is required for applying for loans, etc. Mistakes in this can potentially cause a lot of agony.

  3. If you click on “Generate XML” in the PDF utility, then close and reopen it, and click on “Import from XML”, some of the fields are not populated. This is again due to the fact that all the data is not exported to the XML file.

I did not face any such issues with the Excel utility, but in general, I would urge all of you to just go through the generated XML file before submitting it to the IT Dept. website. You can open the XML file in any web browser such as Firefox or IE.

Calculating Income Or Loss From Property For IT Returns

In: Finance|Internet

25 Jul 2010

In an earlier post, I explained how to file your IT returns online via the IT Department’s website.

This year, the IT Dept. has modified the most common ITR-1 form to include a field for “Income/loss from House Property”, something which was earlier only available in ITR-2. This allows tax payers to declare income or loss for up to a single house in the ITR-1 form itself, instead of having to file the more complicated ITR-2 form.

This excellent move greatly simplifies the IT return filing process for a large number of people who don’t have any source of income other than salary and interest income, but are paying EMIs on a housing loan for one house. It also helps people who have income from rent received from a single let out property. Both these people can now declare their rent income and/or interest payments in the ITR-1 form itself.

But how do we calculate the income or loss from our house property? Here is the procedure as per the IT Dept. (click to enlarge):

For rented/let-out properties:

  1. In (a), enter the total rent which should have been received during the year for the property. This includes the actual rent received, plus that which was due but not received for whatever reason.
  2. In (b), enter the amount of rent which was due but not received during the year.
  3. In (c), enter the tax paid to local authorities, such as Property Tax.
  4. Calculate (d), (e) and (f), which are self explanatory.
  5. In (g), enter the total interest paid towards any home loan taken on that property. Unlike self-occupied property, there is no limit for properties that are rented out.
  6. Calculate (h) and (i) as shown. Assuming no rent arrears from previous years, the value of (i) is your total income/loss from house property and should be entered into Row 2 of the ITR-1 form.

For self-occupied properties:

  1. Since the house is self-occupied, you can neither declare any rent earnings, nor claim deduction for Property Tax or any other local taxes. So rows (a) through (f) will be empty.
  2. The only deduction you can claim for self-occupied property is interest payment towards home loan for the property. This too is limited to Rs. 1,50,000 per year. This must be entered in (g).
  3. The total income/loss from house property will be the interest payment amount entered in (g). This has to be mentioned in Row 2 of ITR-1 form as a NEGATIVE VALUE, so it will be deducted from the taxable income.

Note that in case you own more than one property, the above calculations must be repeated for every property, and the total income/loss from all of them should be declared in Row 2. You would also need to use ITR-2 instead of ITR-1 if you own more than one property.

Shifting To WordPress From Blogger Is So Easy!

In: Internet|Review|Technology

4 Jul 2010

Blogger‘s shock announcement in January this year that they were going to stop FTP publishing support from April 2010 came as a bolt from the blue to thousands of Blogger users like me who use FTP to publish their blog posts to their own URL.

As a result, I was left with three choices:

  1. Move to a BlogSpot URL (yeah, right!)
  2. Use the Blogger custom domain feature. This would have meant that I would have had to publish my blog either on my home page (http://www.vijaypadiyar.in) or on a subdomain like blog.vijaypadiyar.in. But that would mean a loss of painfully gained traffic from other websites, as well as my hard earned PageRank!
  3. Move to a WordPress-based blog

Moving to WordPress was something I had in mind for at least a year now, but I never got around to doing it because there wasn’t a real strong incentive. Also, I was scared of breaking or losing stuff while moving and then having to spend more time fixing it!

But now that there was no other option left, I had to get down to doing it. Luckily for me, there are a lot of excellent tutorials on moving to WordPress from Blogger on the Internet and. By following the steps listed in this tutorial, I was able to shift my blog in about 10 minutes!

The most important thing to take care of when moving from Blogger to WordPress is maintaining your post URLs (or Permalinks, in SEO language). This is because any change in URLs of posts or pages on your blog leads to loss of traffic, as your old URL may already be appearing in relevant search results and having a good PageRank. Other websites too might be linking to some URLs on your blog.

The problem arises because the default format of Blogger and WordPress post URLs is quite different. So all your old posts will have different URLs after you shift to WordPress, if you don’t follow the instructions in the tutorial mentioned above. Fortunately, retaining the same URLs is extremely easy, thanks to the amazing flexibility that WordPress offers. (And this is just one of the many, many reasons why you’ll love your decision to move to WordPress!)

The benefits of hosting your blog on WordPress are:

  • Extremely customizable. There are far more customizations available than in Blogger. You can choose what elements appear in the sidebar, how your post URLs look, location of uploaded files/images, feed settings, etc. Although it is easier to customize the blog layout in the new Blogger.
  • Huge choice of awesome WordPress themes. I got a neat little theme for my blog too! And unlike Blogger, changing themes does not affect the layout, plugins or elements in your blog. This is a huge advantage over Blogger.
  • Very easy to add functionality through plugins. I was able to add a “Digg this” button, a “Retweet” button, an “AddThis” button, Google AdSense ads, a tag cloud, anti-spam comment filter, a “smart” 404 page, etc. with minimal effort. Doing the same thing on Blogger would have taken several days at least, and lots of trials and errors. Also, WordPress immediately notifies you whenever any updates to plugins are available. Updating plugins is a one-click process.
  • Easy to backup, import and export posts and/or blogs. Restoring blogs is not possible in Blogger, as the database is under Blogger’s control, not yours.

In short, comparing WordPress to Blogger is like comparing Firefox with drabby old Internet Explorer! Trust me, move your blog to WordPress and you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it much earlier!

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Hi, I'm Vijay Padiyar! I'm a friendly guy with a witty sense of humor. I was born in Baroda, Gujarat and am currently settled in Bangalore. I'm a Leo by birth and certainly by character! So pick up any good book on zodiac signs, flip to the Leo section, and you'll know me rather well!

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