We figured there was no better time to launch our new site than the start of 2023-24 tax year. We know that’s a weird thing to say and do, but both of us have had experience working in payroll for a number of years. This post will be relatively short but let it serve as an introduction to why we even launched this site in the first place.
You see, last year and for the 10 years prior the new tax year in the UK (April 6th) had a pretty huge meaning in my professional career.
For a few weeks before it was a scramble to interpret the sometimes illogical changes that HMRC had been making, convert them in to code and implement them in to our payroll solution (It was the fastest back then, it’s probably even faster now). Then help migrate all clients’ data through a ‘year end’ process ready to start all over again for another year. When all was said and done it was a time for celebration with the team that we had managed to deliver a successful tax year change yet again.
2022 was the last time that I got to experience the pain and celebration of the new tax year having exited my previous business in that world (it was left in more than capable hands!).
For the past year I’ve been contemplating if I’d miss payroll, the constant rush of work, legislation enforced deadlines and clients. I don’t. I don’t miss it for a second. Leaving payroll was the best thing that I’ve done both personally and professionally.
Instead the last year was spent mostly being quite relaxed and thinking of ways to step out of everything that I’d done prior, including software of any kind. Yes, I wanted to leave tech. I thought I did.
Unfortunately (or actually quite fortunately) that didn’t work out. Like at all. We wanted to do something with dogs, but with the economic uncertainty, landowners generally being less than appealing to deal with, and other businesses of the same type shifting what they do due to the intense personal commitment it required and lack of viability that dog businesses appear to be having it wasn’t meant to be.
Meanwhile, in between my bouts of Elden Ring and Ghost of Tsushima on PS5 whilst trying to take it easy, Cedita was growing organically. Despite taking a role that could only be described as a sleepy backseat driver, things got busier and busier. The team kept growing, clients couldn’t get enough of our service, PureSMS grew to over 400 customers with zero marketing. I decided to step up recently and do more client facing interactions & consulting work, whilst Karolina excelled at managing the developer relations aspect, meticulously translating requirements in to specifications and ensuring timely delivery. We kept investing in our support of charities, expanded that to local businesses even more than we already did, and just generally being good people in software.
Things got a little out of hand though. Whilst we could handle the influx of bespoke development clients as well as the increased workload, the true heroes of the whole operation, our developers, were spread quite thin. In doing so we were unable to deliver some of the products that we wanted to as we were so focused on delivering for our customers. It’s a “problem” that practically every tech company faces when working with bespoke, a problem that I had dealt with before in previous businesses and a problem I knew that I was going to solve again.
That brings us to today, the start of the UK tax year 2023-24.
We have started this site to document our journey as we remodel Cedita and our business landscape. We’ve started to invest in some huge things, things that have been random thoughts for a while, things that we never got the chance to do previously due to other commitments. Oh, and we’re an Apple family now (if you don’t know us that will mean nothing, but for those of you that do… 😱 More on that later). We’ll try to keep this site up to date as often as possible, likely every couple of weeks.
Customers of Cedita that may read this, don’t be alarmed. Everything we do we will keep doing (though it may have a different name soon), and I can promise you that we will do it even better.
Until next time.
