I am pretty new to bookkeeping and it has just occurred to me that I may be wasting time by entering too much detail when logging a purchase. For example, when entering a purchase from B&Q there may be 20 or so items on the the receipt. I have been entering all of these items as listed on the receipt but this is time consuming. Would it be ok to just enter as ’ painting and decorating supplies’ or ’ electrical supplies’. I am also filing the full itemised paper receipts.
The main thing is that things are categorised correctly (for example, not putting rent in general purchases), and you have the backing documents for it.
If HMRC should ask any questions, it’s the original documents they’d be wanting to see (front and back).
Grouping items should be fine, but just remember to consider:
The category (as above, rent goes in rent for example)
The VAT rate (only if you’re VAT registered yourself)
The costs
However, saying that - I’m not a bookkeeper, so if anyone knows any different, they’re welcome to comment here. But I hope that helps!
Thank you for your advice. I understand about the category having to be correct, but I’m just wondering how much detail needs to be entered under ‘General Purchase’ for numerous items my husband has bought.
I have weekly invoices from suppliers to my shop that have dozens of individual items listed on them, I just put the whole lot into QuickFile as one General Purchases line labelled “Goods for sale” for the total amount. I’m not yet VAT registered, but when that happens I’ll have to make it three lines rather than one (for the zero-rated, 5% and 20% subtotals).
This is pretty much the whole point of Quickfile & the receipt hub, every transaction has the original suppliers invoice attached so there is no need to itemise every single line item. As @ian_roberts says, the only time I make a multiple line purchase invoice is when the VAT is not straight forward, although more often than not all I actually do is just override the calculated VAT amount in the receipt hub and rely on the attached scan to do the explaining.
I’m seeing the VAT man soon so we’ll soon see if he is happy about it!
He was extremely impressed with QuickFile! Going on the positive comments he made about QuickFile I think if all the people he saw used QuickFile he would be very happy.
Regarding the actual invoices and the VAT content he was happy to see the original invoice with the full breakdown as mentioned above. I had a couple of purchase invoices with multiline entries to alter previous misclaimed VAT amounts and again that was all fine as the original invoices/receipts were attached to the QuickFile purchase invoices.
