TDS SOFTWARE: Saral TDS

Saral TDS is meant for digital filing of TDS Returns, and we reviewed its Professional edition. It includes calculation of tax and generation of certain statutory forms as per the Income-Tax Act 1961 and Income-Tax rules 1962. The software has been validated using FVU (File Validation Utility) developed by NSDL (National Securities Depository Limited). The software's interface is fairly simple and user friendly, built with a Visual Basic at the frontend and MS Access at the backend. There are deductor and deductee masters along with the employee and bank masters in which you can enter relevant information. The applicable tax rates have been given in a separate file. The package lets you export the final TDS to NSDL Utility in the prescribed format, which is required to validate the data entered. Form for entry of challans remittance to the bank is also provided and is fairly exhaustive. The codes of bank branches authorized to collect direct taxes are mentioned in the NSDL's website. If you want to do further analysis of data, then Saral gives you the provision of exporting it to MS Excel. Another interesting feature of the package is that it can generate and print TDS Certificates for your employees. When digitally filing tax returns, the labels on the media (such as floppy and CD) must comply with certain norms. This package allows you to generate these labels as per the norms.

The Employee Master interface provides an overview of the tax payable by each employee

The bottom line: Overall, the package works well and is a good buy. We were, however, a little disappointed with the manual entry of tax rates for
TDS.

Sudarshana Mishra