youmayneedthis now has now its own domain

I have hosted the blog to its own domain now at blog.youmayneedthis.com. Existing blog entries will continue to be here. New posts will likely show up there now.

Update: first series of posts on trip to Srisailam can be found here

Sending by post – ITR-V to income tax department

Today – I went to post office to send the ITR-V by post. I do so every year. Counter sign with black ink at the place marked by ‘sign in’ in the form. Put it through Speed post.

This year, the post office executive mentioned that speed post won’t accept an address with ‘Post Bag’. so, I have two options – a) send through normal post b) strike the post bag part in the address; send through speed post.

I took the option (b). Given the income tax form mentions that forms are accepted through speed post or normal post. Income tax department should have taken care of this or release a directive on this. Many-many of us are going to have this discussion when they reach post office and need to make a choice.

I will update once I get acknowledgement for receipt of ITR-V from the department.

Update: I have received the email acknowledgement of the receipt of the ITR-V today. so, option-2 seems to work fine.

What choice did you pick?

Login to tds site for form 26S fails

This is the tax payment time for all the salaried professional. You may be one of them. I have been to tdscpc.gov.in/ today and tried nearly 10 times. login failed. It keeps coming back to the login page without any error. You are left wondering whether you entered the password or capcha incorrect. It won’t say anything. Do not pull your hairs. No matter what you do – Login page will keep coming back to you. Keep trying patiently.

After couple of retries – I reached this conclusion.

1. There is some flaky issue/bug on the website. I keyed my password very carefully (even after resetting the password to new one) and got the Capcha also right (since it was very clear).
2. Solution – carefully, keep trying couple of times. You should be able to successfully login in 10-20 attempts.
3. My attempt succeeded by the time I reached support executive on the call center number. I have to hang up as problem was resolved!

Did you face the same issue? What was your solution?

gmail inbox new look

Some of you would have seen the new look of your gmail inbox. I am also one of them. At the onset, it seems useful. This is because it is addressing the main pain-point of dealing with email overload. In my case too, the primary overload came from social, promotions.

Recently, I have used the gmail feature of reporting spam, which also lets you send unsubscribe mail to the promotion originator in single click. That was a good feature. I had used the unsubscribe link in most cases. In one case, the promotional mail was not showing the unsubscribe link but this gmail option seem to do some magic underneath and came as a savior.

Now – when I can separate all the promotional mails in a separate tab – it does seem to address one important need.

More as I use it more.

Reliance fresh good customer experience

Typically, reliance fresh chain is considered for lower price but not for customer experience. I was writing but avoiding to describe what you typically expect to see there. one can typically associate the brand with lower or lowest prices – at least – for vegetables and fruits.

What I faced today – was an incidence of very good customer care. I was kind of surprised. Hence, it does need a mention and accolade. I had purchased 5 kg of Tur dal packet last Sunday and forgot to pick it up from the store. I realized after a week today. During my weekend grocery shopping, I mentioned on the counter the incidence along with my bill (I keep the bills in the car for couple of weeks before recycling them).

Store owner straight went to stocks, checked the status to see that one packet seem to be in access (at least that is what he told me), and gave the packet to my surprise – without any resistance. On top of that, such up to date keeping of stock – well done!

boot mgr is compressed error and laptop is not booting

One of my friend in the office faced this on his laptop. He was stuck.

I found this helpful thread on the net that helped save his day. It took few minutes to build a boot dvd of win7 and follow the steps given by moti68. Since I am not on howtogeek.com, I could not personally thank him. but he deserves loads of thanks for saving day of the person.

People like this, always re-enforce in me, willingness to help others and share that other might need, some day. They bring up on you that there is need to give away for what others have been giving to you. That was the whole motive behind starting this blog.  Needless to say – it gives immense satisfaction to see that — some of what you shared in past – continues to helps others.

That’s all for now.

Paying your traffic challan sent by post

Recently, I was sent a traffic challan by post. The automated cameras on a signal in kondapur has snapped the two wheeler for skipping a red signal. It is required to be paid in 15 days of receipt. It can be paid only at eseva centers or AP online centers. I wanted to pay it online if possible.

I could not find way to pay it online at eseva center. AP online website was not even working. Hence, I was looking for offline centers. Eseva website shows a eseva center at cyber gateway, hitec city. but the office has been closed. APOnline shows a center in kondapur; That is likely run by a internet cafe (franchise) – it was closed on sunday. It is located in main lane (left turn) where all buses turn left for kondapur bus depot.

Finally, I came to know that an Eseva center is available in gachibowli next to Reliance Fresh and Café Nandini, on the same side of the road. It is open in normal working hours and likely on sunday also (I am not sure of Sunday). I could pay the traffic challan here with an additional service charge of INR 40/-.

Entering indian stock LTCG into ITR2 form

I was filling the income tax form ITR2 and need to fill the LTCG (long term capital gain) details there. It was not clear where (which schedule(s)) and what to put there. After little bit of googling and flipping through the ITR2 schedules, I arrived at this procedure to fill the indian stock LTCG details there.

Before I go into procedure – some background. At the onset, Instruction manual and ITR2 forms are available for download here. Instruction manual is helpful at times if you are layman, or a salaried employee trying to efile your tax returns yourselves. What you may find intimidating — is the references to sections and sub-sections and if you try to read some of those sections — for example, section 111a or 112.  You may likely find them complex to parse and time consuming to digest. Title from schedule CG – Item B – LTCG

From asset in the case of others where proviso under section 112(1) is not applicable

For a layman, this is a straight bouncer. Income tax dept. is trying every year to make it easy to fill the form for citizens. Probably, they will give better text which non-CAs (chartered accountants) can parse and not feel intimidated. I attempted to read through section 112 when trying to fill this section; I soon realized, it is not going to be easy.

Instruction manual likely needs more of How to sections. For example – How to enter short term/long term gains from indian stocks? Sure a technical manual for the professionals (read chartered accountants) is also needed.

I found this link which gave me lead into this work. (Update: I found another link which re-enforced that LTCG from indian stocks needs to be only entered in schedule EI)

The procedure:

1. LTCG from indian stocks needs to be entered into schedule EI, not schedule CG-OS.
2. Dividend income from indian stocks also needs to be entered into schedule EI, not schedule CG-OS.
3. Purchase price needs to be indexed before computing the profit or loss.
4. You need purchase price of your stocks for the computation. [I assume here that purchase date is older than a year (since LTCG)].
5. icicidirect helped for (4)  – since they provided out of the box – an excel with profit and loss computation for the transactions. Otherwise, you will need to build an excel that may look something like this.

Stock Symbol

Qty

Sale Date

Sale Rate

Sale Value

Purchase Date

Purchase Rate

> 1 Year   Profit/Loss (Sold after 1 year of Holding)

abc

30

12-Apr-12

234.95

6988.14

2-Dec-10

170.1

Purchase Value	Indexed purchase value	Profit/Loss(-) without indexing	profit/loss(-) with indexing	2010-11 CII	2012-13 CII*
5145.9	6166.39	1842.24	821.75	711	852

*CII stands for cost inflation index. A table is available in the instruction manual for this.

Hope this helps. It took me couple of hours to get to this. If you are professional CA, and find something wrong with the procedure – do drop a comment. I tried to keep it accurate to the extent I could understand.

Update: I shared ITR-2 filing for FY2013-14 (aka AY2014-15) here.

Cancellation of spicejet ticket on makemytrip.com

I needed the information about what kind of charges will apply if I were to cancel spicejet ticket 24hrs vs 12 hrs vs 3 hrs prior to flight departure. I googled around and could not find the information. makemytrip.com seem to not have the right faq for the same. While railway rules are quite clear and public in this regards but I could not find the same documentation for the air tickets.

Finally called makemytrip customer support. I need to wait for ~20 minutes to get help of the support executive. He was quite helpful though and succinctly answered the query.

Here it goes*:

1. You will be charged 1250/- (1000 airline charges + 250/- makemytrip service charges). This applies until 3 hrs prior to departure of the flight.
2. then, you need to approach the airline directly to cancel the ticket. I did not enquire about the charges here.

* This do assume that your ticket is not purchased under special fares where cancellation is not possible, or not under general cancellation policy.

Disable notification checkboxes below comments form in wordpress blog

I need to disable these checkboxes below comments from in one other wordpress blog.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.
Notify me of new posts by email.

I figured out that these are apart of Jetpack plugin here. but Jetpack has lot of features and its settings. These setting can be found under dashboard->Settings->discussion->Under Jetpack Subscriptions Settings – disable follow blog and follow comments settings.

That is it. These two checkboxes will clear from the comments form.