Hi, I’ve just signed up and did the various imports and setups of my accounts and expenses. I’m looking to do my first VAT return and nothing is pulling through, all values are zero, but the period is July/August/September and I had both payments and expenses in September.
I’ve made sure everything is tagged in my bank account, and expenses all refer to a purchase entry. I also made invoices in the system for the payments I had. It seems initially the dates on my purchases were set to today’s date even though I set them differently, but they are all in an marked as paid. I had a look at the Oct/Nov/Dec on as well and it seems to have pulled the reclaimable VAT through on purchases there. I’m concerned about inputting this stuff in manually so would like to make sure the data is brought in correctly.
This kind of confusion is almost always down to your account being configured for cash accounting when you expected accrual, or vice versa. Under cash accounting (the default setting for new QuickFile accounts) it’s the date of payment that determines which quarter each item belongs to, whereas under accrual accounting it’s the date of the sale or purchase invoice.
If you’re set for cash accounting then an invoice dated in September but not paid until October will appear in the Oct-Dec return, not the Jul-Sep one.
If you’re on cash accounting we will take the date of tagged payment as the payment date. The due date isn’t taken into account for the purposes of VAT returns.
If you’re still a bit stuck, let us know and we’ll take some account details from you and take a look to see what’s going on.
Yeah I switched it to Accrual and there’s no change to either of the returns it offers me - nothing in the one ending September, the other ending December shows some values for VAT on expenses, I think for a single item. The rest of my expense claims aren’t showing at all.
I may have found it, the start for my VAT filing was set to when I signed up to Quickfile, I have stuff prior to that. I changed the date to cover everything and will now try to make sure it lines up with what my records say. Possibly I should switch back to Cash Accounting, which I always thought sounded correct.
Okay getting warmer, VAT due based on my invoices is correct for sure, I seem to be missing something on my expenses as the VAT reclaim value is too low. I exported out of my bank so stuff based on outgoings should be correct already but I’ll poke around some more.
Would I be right in thinking that until I pay a previous quarter’s VAT, it’s going to show up in subsequent quarters as well? So if I’ve not had any payments in Oct/Nov/Dec and not paid Jul/Aug/Sep they will show the same VAT due? If so it looks like everything is correct in the fullness of time now, although I think something is being missed in the last quarter and only showing in the next.
Cash Accounting Vat returns are designed to look for anything paid within the period you are running plus anything which has not previously been included from older periods (this it to catch late entries).
If More than one period is showing as Open the earliest returns transactions will show in later return periods until it is submitted (this is when the transactions are flagged as been filed/dealt with.).
The process needs to be completed in chronological order.
