The year end of the company is 30-09-2022. As it happens the next year end was wrongly saved on Quickfile as 31-03-2023. When I realised this today and tried to change the date to 30-09-2022, I could not do it because it stated that I cannot change the year end date to a date in the past. Why not? How do I fix this? Given that I was trying to do it today, the closest I could change the year end date to is 03-10-2022, which is not accurate or ideal.
Does the invoice numbering restart automatically with reference to the new year, when a new financial year starts?
Nothing changes, numbering never restarts automatically. If you wanted to use a separate series of invoice numbers each year then you would have to manually set the number of the first invoice you create to be (say) 2023-00001 and then subsequent auto generated numbers would count up from there, but most businesses wouldn’t bother and would just let the numbers keep counting up in one unbroken sequence since this is what HMRC prefer for VAT purposes.
The only effect of the year end date that I’m aware of in QuickFile is to set the predefined date ranges of quarters and financial years for the reports (P&L, etc). You configure your next year end date after today and it will extrapolate back and forward from there to determine the periods to offer for reports.
There’s also the “year end process” that locks a prior financial year once all that year’s entries have been fully reconciled (which can take months past the actual year end date), but again that calculates back and forward from the configured date - it only cares about the month and day, you choose the year when you run the YE tool.
Thank you Ian. In relation to invoices, which are year related (i.e. 2021-0001) do HMRC still prefer the same numbering to continue even though we are in 2022, 2023 etc?
Well the rule for VAT invoices is that you must use “one or more” contiguous series of numbers - you can use one series per year or per month or per “brand” if you have several trading styles etc. but the point is that within each series there must be no unexplained gaps. If you get a VAT inspection and the inspector sees any gaps in the numbering you must be able to explain why. Obviously this is simplest for everyone when you just use one continuous sequence starting from 1, but the rules allow for “one or more” and if you’re already using per year numbering you might as well continue the pattern.
The series don’t necessarily have to all start from 1, they just have to have no gaps, so it’s up to you whether you go from 2021-1234 to 2022-0001 or 2022-1235, but whichever you choose you have to stick with it. I guess it depends whether you expect to raise any more 2021 invoices after you have started on the 2022 series.