As a first-time user of QuickFile (I am impressed) I find myself in a position where Companies House and HMRC require different reporting periods and HMRC requires two filing periods - an annual account, and a 10-day account to align the accounting periods thereafter. Companies House, I am told, allow accounts to be longer than one year, which gives me three, overlapping accounting periods to report on. How do I set an accounting period of, say, 10 days and produce a meaningful ‘year end’ account? Simple instructions on which parts of QuickFile to use would be appreciated!
We actually only support one accounting period (e.g. 1st April - 31st March), so in this case, you would need to adjust the dates manually to get the period you want.
At the top of each of the reports (such as profit and loss), you will see a date range. By default, this is populated with the current accounting period, but you can switch these to any date range you wish.
I recommend speaking to your accountant to see what information and reports they require, but all your reports can be found under the Reports heading. We only show a selection in the list there, but you can view the full range by clicking on Show all reports.
Thanks for your reply. What I am not sure about is the simplified year end process - it seemed to me that I had to set the period manually, as you suggest, run the year end - and then print reports.
Then I would have to unlock the account, delete all the year end journal entries and repeat the process. This is quite tedious (and a little alarming when the scope of the ‘delete all’ button is not clear!), but in the first year of a business, presumably the year end process has no impact on the report, so the year end process can be ignored and multiple balance sheets/P&Ls can be generated simply by doing what you suggest above … in short, have I over-complicated this by running the year-end process?
Another query is why the P&L report shows losses based on depreciation charges that are nominal, and do not have an impact on tax liability - leading to a difference between the P&L report and the tax report. This makes no sense to me as QuickFile is already aware that claims for depreciation cannot be submitted when the asset has been already been charged as an expense?
Running a P&L report in this way can turn a company that makes a profit into one that makes a loss with implications for credit scores, or have I misinterpreted the logic of your report?
Usually your accountant would be able to produce the year end journal for you, either by using the simplified tool as a base or by manually creating the entries. I think this is something you should certainly run past them to ensure it’s correct. Same would apply with the depreciation. Although if you wish to share some of your depreciation journals here, either myself, my colleagues or another user (some of which are accountants) may be able to advise on whether they are correct or not.
Regarding the tax summary report, this is a guidance only report. It shouldn’t be taken as literal as there are various tax calculations that could be used, or reliefs that could be adopted which would affect your tax calculation. But it should be able to give you a ballpark figure based on the data within QuickFile.
If you don’t have an accountant, we could certainly put you in touch with one if you wish? We have a panel of accountants (who are independent of QuickFile, but are familiar with it), who may be able to offer you better guidance than what I can.
