- Designated staff can now waive penalty, interest, and collection penalty on a payment, by amount or by percent, for one, several, or all accounts on the payment, for a single year and one or more tax units. A reason is required, a waive cannot exceed the calculated amount, and every override is traceable on the account. Access is controlled by its own permission.

- A new report under Reports lists every penalty, interest, and collection penalty amount waived through Override P&I, filterable by date range and optionally by tax year and taxing unit. Results are grouped by taxing unit with subtotals and a grand total, and each row shows date and time, user, account, tax year, bucket, calculated amount, waived amount, and reason. Only overrides performed in TaxOffice 4 are included.

Waived Penalty & Interest by Taxing Unit: report parameters

- New Change Returned field on Calculate Change records the change handed back. Defaults to change due and must be within a nickel of it.

- A shortage within the threshold is absorbed; an overage within it is kept.

- The difference is spread across taxing units in proportion to their share of total due and posts as a Penny Adjustment (Shortage) or Penny Adjustment (Overage) detail row.

- The account closes at $0.00 with no strike-off, overpayment record, delinquency notice, or refund.

- Only payments that close the balance are adjusted. Non-cash tenders and differences over the threshold behave as today.

- Tender field renamed Payment Amount; Calculate Change field renamed Cash Tendered.

Payment Amount on a settling cash payment, with the eligibility message

Calculate Change: Cash Tendered, Change Returned, and the absorbed $0.04 shortage

Payment History: Penny Adjustment - Shortage rows spread across the taxing units

- Contact Spindlemedia support to turn it on. Takes effect on the next payment and can be turned off at any time.

- When on, the Payments screen shows a banner that Penny Adjustment is active. No per-payment choice for the clerk.

Payments screen banner when Penny Adjustment is on for the office

- The Homestead / Non-Homestead choice is now available when creating any installment agreement, whether or not the account carries a homestead exemption, matching the legacy installment application. The choice is locked once the agreement is created and is shown when the agreement is viewed or printed.

Create Installment Agreement with the Homestead / Non-Homestead choice

- When a refund payment that includes Recalc Refund detail is reversed, the user is warned and offered a recalculation of the affected account and year. Accepting restores the full refund due and queues the refund for reissue.

Reversal warning offering the recalculation

- Edit Owner now has a Country field. With a non-U.S. country selected, State can be left blank and a foreign postal code entered, so statements, notices, and refund checks can reach owners living abroad. U.S. addresses still require State and a 5- or 9-digit Zip.

Edit Owner with a non-U.S. country, State blank, and a foreign postal code

- When exemption edits made during Phase 1 create levy receivables for the new year, Calculate Taxes now clears them as part of the step instead of stopping with a request to contact Spindlemedia. Only levy receivables in a year with no starting balances are cleared, other receivable types are untouched, and each clear is recorded with who ran it and what was removed.

- After a rollback completes, the note on each affected account lists the related parent or child account numbers with acres and acreage value broken out by tax year, so rollback questions can be answered from the account screen without opening the Ag Dashboard. Accounts with no parent detail still receive a note showing their own acres and acreage value per year.

- Account notes written from a supplement now carry the appraisal district's change code alongside the change description, and a row with a code but no description now produces a note instead of none.

- A new SIT report lists each dealer with their UPT factor and mailing address for a chosen tax year, so next-year escrow factors can be sent to dealers without requesting a spreadsheet from Support.

- The public Tax Limitation Calculator at tools.spindlemedia.com now pre-fills the TEA final Tax Year 2026 Maximum Compressed Rates, published August 27, 2026, for all 1,013 school districts. Prior-year rates are unchanged.

Tax Limitation Calculator with the 2026 MCR pre-filled

Tax unit rate editor accepting seven decimal places

We've rebuilt the engine that generates tax statements. It's live for every office, and there's nothing to turn on or change. Statements from TaxOffice 4, Tax Client and the taxpayer portal all come from the new engine.

Measured on our hosted offices: typical TaxOffice 4 and portal statement times, September vs 6–8 October.

A typical receipt now takes about 1.3 seconds, down from 2.6 seconds in September. A new receipt engine is coming soon to make them faster still.

The new TaxOffice 4 interface is ready for everyone. Choose from your user menu. It uses the full width of your screen and keeps the account in view as you move between tabs, with:

Switch back to Classic from the same menu at any time; your data and permissions stay the same. To make the new interface the default for everyone in your office, contact your Spindlemedia account manager.

Reply to the announcement email or contact your Spindlemedia account manager.

The main grid sorts on every sortable column, pages by account so a ceiling band is never split across pages, and remembers your filters and selections for the session.

Open any ceiling to see one row per run that touched it — the certified run first, then each supplement under its tape name with before and after amounts. The header shows Account Number, Owner, Tax Year, and Tax Unit.

Every column except Account can be toggled on or off. Hidden columns close up with no gap and come back in their original spot, and your choices are saved per user.

Accounts where two or more owners hold a ceiling-establishing exemption and none owns the whole property now carry a Multi-ceiling pill, so your office can find and review them.

SB 1951 ended the 5% administrative fee withheld for the appraisal district beginning with tax year 2026. TaxOffice 4 no longer withholds the fee on 2026-and-later penalties, while 2025 and prior years keep it regardless of deposit date. Distribution Summary, Distribution Summary By Year, and Rendition Summary balance across mixed-year date ranges.

When a disbursement posts to the general ledger, the administrative fee is broken out only for the 2025-and-prior portion. The Entity Distribution Report shows the full penalty for 2026 collections and Total Disbursement ties.

The Installment Agreements search grid now shows Closed/Completed, Cancelled, or Defaulted for closed agreements, matching the status on the details page, so completed agreements can be told apart from cancelled or defaulted ones without opening each record.

Each agreement's type now appears in the search results grid, matching the badge on the details page.

Users no longer need full Admin access just to reach the one admin function they're allowed to use. The menu shows up when a user holds at least one admin item permission, and it lists only those items. Fiscal Year End and Tax Year Rollover pages also enforce their permission on direct URL access.

The report now has its own permission in addition to the feature flag, so administrators can give it to just the staff who need it. Direct URL access without the permission is blocked.

Offices that want the owner's name and address in the receipt header regardless of who remitted the payment can now have this turned on per office. Offices already receiving this behavior are unchanged.

When a refund check is printed and posted from SMIGL Disbursements or BankRec CheckWriter, the payment comment in TaxOffice 4 now records the check number, print date, and who printed it, so staff can tell a taxpayer when a check was printed without a separate log. Reprints update the comment with the new check number and date.

Accounts carrying an absolute exemption code now import with their full value exempted whether the district reports taxable value as zero or equal to market value, so they reconcile and stay off the Bad Accounts Report.

The per-entity §11.145 exemption Orion CADs report for 2026 is now staged with the amount the CAD reported, using the same exemption type as other CAD modules, so affected accounts balance to the CAD's taxable value.

Both applications show a banner naming the client and identifying the environment as TEST, following the TaxOffice 4 design, so test activity is easy to distinguish from production.

TaxOffice 4 moved to the latest version of its UI component library and a rebuilt application theme. You'll notice crisper brand colors and correctly sized checkboxes, and grids keep each row's values in place when you sort or edit.

Cancel buttons in dialogs are readable without hovering, action buttons and date fields sit at their normal height, the grid pager no longer shows an extra item count, and the "Items per page" dropdown opens attached to its control.

New Features & Enhancements

Opening an account that is currently out of balance raises a modal, so the imbalance is visible before a payment is processed, or a statement is generated.

Real and mineral property statements generated in Tax Office 4 now include 5-Year History, meeting Texas Tax Code §31.01(c) and matching Tax Client and Mass Billing output.

Generated worksheets and calculated rates match the current official form after the Comptroller’s mid-season re-publication.

Printed motion language and statements reflect the correct combined county rate.

Counties with multiple fund worksheets no longer need to add and re-enter combined county rates by hand.

AD Import ingests the HB 1399 Animal Feed exemption fields from the True Automation (PACS) 8_0_34 export layout and maps them to the existing “Animal Feed Held for Sale” exemption type.

AD Import appears as a launchable card alongside the rest of the Tax Suite.

Profiles that are no longer in use can be deactivated, so the profile list shows only active configurations.

Large mass-statement runs now render in parallel chunks

Statement renders above an internal size threshold are split and rendered concurrently across the Crystal worker pool, so large runs complete instead of stalling.

Voiding a batch that contains an unpaid payment no longer doubles the account’s paid amount.

Quick Search no longer times out and drops users to the fatal reload screen.

Details-page grids no longer time out on billing sets with large imports.

Snapshot processing performance improved on large account imports.

Very large statement render requests no longer fail mid-run.

File copy no longer times out when source files are reached over a redirected network drive.

Escrow Transfer — Year-End Processing

● Escrow Transfer rebuilt in Tax Office 4

◦ The year-end Escrow Transfer program — covering both regular and Mobile Home escrow — now runs natively from the Admin section of Tax Office 4.

● Escrow Transfer added to Tax Year Rollover (Step 3)

◦ Escrow Transfer is now available as a deep link within the Tax Year Rollover process, with the tax years pre-filled from the rollover context so it runs at the right point in your year-end sequence. Clicking on this link within the TYR process will take the user directly to Escrow Transfer in Tax Office 4.

● Distribution P&I reports now correctly classify “313 Limitation” receivables as levy instead of penalty.

● Resolved an issue where the TIF Collections Aggregate report dropped additional payments made on the same account.

● Resolved an issue where the TIF Increment by Tax Unit report changed locked prior-year totals after a supplement load.

● Improved balance calculation performance for accounts with suit or bankruptcy activity — large offices will see noticeably faster processing.

- Support for Harris County Appraisal District's updated 2026 exemption codes, keeping exemption processing aligned with the current certified roll.

- Import and export handling updated to match HCAD's 2026 file format changes for clean data exchange in the new tax year.

-Truth-in-Taxation worksheet forms updated to the 2026 versions for accurate rate calculations and reporting.

- Changed notice forms updated to the 2026 versions to meet current Truth-in-Taxation notice requirements.

New Features & # Enhancements

● Frozen State Report (Form 50-897B) now available in TaxOffice v4.0

◦ Tax office staff can generate and export frozen homestead ceiling data directly from the application.

◦ All required parameters are now fully validated, including Appraisal District State ID, School District ID, County ID, and ISD Name.

◦ Report output is Comptroller-ready — it exports a CSV formatted to match Form 50-897B specifications for direct submission.

● Payment Importer: GroupPay and Lockbox batches now appear correctly in Batch Manager.

◦ Previously, batches created by GroupPay or Lockbox files were invisible in Batch Manager, so staff could not work with or close them. Batches are now tagged correctly when created and appear as expected.

● Account Details: Ctrl+P now prints the full statement, not just the summary section.

● Multi-Year Recalculation: refunds no longer include unchecked years, keeping batches in balance.

◦ When unchecking years to exclude from a refund, their amounts were still added to the batch total, so the header and line items did not match, and the batch could not be balanced or closed. Only checked years are now counted in the batch total.

● Installment Agreements: a 12-month agreement now generates all 12 payments.

◦ A payment-sizing calculation error caused the balance to reach zero one month early, generating only 11 payment rows and affecting printed coupon books and agreement documents. Payment sizing is corrected so all 12 rows are generated.

● Past Due indicator is now suppressed during the grace-period window.

◦ The portal previously showed a red “Account is past due” warning during the grace period before any penalty is assessed, causing taxpayer confusion and unnecessary calls to county offices. Display logic now aligns with how penalties are calculated, so the warning appears only after the grace period expires.

New Features & Enhancements

● Year-to-Date Detail Report — Show Only True Differences

● Quarter Pay / Half Pay / Disaster Pay Summary — Line-Item Subtotals

● Penalty & Interest Balance — Faster Calculation

● Print Correspondence — Date-Scoped PDF

● Batch Manager — Dual-Lookup Ownership (Entra ID + TaxUsername)

● Batch Manager — Normalized Username Display

● Resolved §33.07 collection penalties not calculating on Installment Agreement schedules for 2025.

Several enhancements across the TO4 workspace improve day-to-day workflow accuracy, correspondence handling, and receivable management.

● Attorney Notice Date – Updated Label Across TO4

◦ The date field previously labeled "33.07 Date" has been renamed to "Attorney Notice Date" throughout TO4 for clearer language and alignment with internal terminology.

● Delete Correspondence on Account

◦ Users can now delete correspondence records directly from an account, giving staff greater control over account history and document cleanup.

● 33.07 Bulk Action – Exclusion Rules for Ineligible Receivables

◦ The 33.07 Bulk Action tool now automatically excludes ineligible receivables, reducing manual cleanup and improving processing accuracy.

● Receivables Summary Sort – Disaster Pay Grouping

◦ Receivables in the Summary view now group and sort correctly when Disaster Pay is applied, ensuring balances tie out cleanly.

● Remitter Refresh on Receivables Screen

◦ The Remitter field on the Receivables screen now refreshes automatically to reflect updated values without requiring a page reload.

Reporting enhancements include a new balancing report and jurisdiction-specific distribution rules.

● Percentage Collections Report – All Years (TO4)

◦ Added the Percentage Collections Report (All Years) to the Balancing Reports suite in TO4, supporting multi-year collection reconciliation.

TaxOffice

● TO4 Receivables screen display issue resolved — records now render correctly in all view modes.

● Remitter field on TO4 Receivables now refreshes to show newly saved changes (follow-up fix).

● Account List: resolved false duplicate error caused by substring match on account numbers.

● TNT tab: resolved infinite-spinner issue that prevented content from loading after selecting a year.

● TNT tab: Delete and Save buttons have been repositioned to prevent accidental clicks.

Dealer Portal

● SIT Portal: Cancel button now properly restores required fields on HE Dealer Sales when a removal is reversed.

AD Import

● RefundTrac Report Viewer now loads successfully in production.

● Posted Refunds report now generates successfully instead of stalling on load.

SMIGL

● SMIGL Connections tab now accepts server names longer than 50 characters.