Importing sales invoices with VAT amounts rather than rates

Glen can you help. A new clients uses a web based retail shop to raise its sales invoices and I wish to import these into Quickfile. However a lot of the products have VAT exemptions for health reasons, I can export the invoices with te correct amount of VAT but unlike the purchase import tool I can determine the actual VAT charged only the VAT rate which is not what I need. Is there another option?

Hi @Aspyre_Accountancy

If the file is a CSV file, you can specify a column for the VAT rate. Is that what you’re looking for, or more for specifying the exact amount of VAT charged?

There’s a full list of supported fields here:
http://community.quickfile.co.uk/t/importing-sales-and-purchase-invoices/8885

Another option may be to use either our API (a developer can set this up to link your client’s web based shop straight into their QuickFile account to generate invoices etc.), or to look at a tool like Zapier.

Yes I’m afraid the ability to specify a precise VAT amount on CSV imports is limited to purchase invoices only. Sales invoices are stored a little different internally so it’s harder for us to achieve this.

I know that the multi-invoice entry form will support this but not via CSVs I’m afraid.

We can of course look at altering this behaviour but it would need to go in the queue to be looked at in more detail.

I looked into this a while back but I couldn’t find a way to override the specific VAT amount on a sales invoice using the API - the InvoiceItemLine type only allows for unit cost, quantity and tax percentage, not the specific tax amount. My use case is similar, I sell a variety of items at different VAT rates (0% for food, 5% for tampons etc, 20% for toiletries and confectionery) and I want to create one invoice for each day’s sales with the exact net and VAT amounts exported from my EPOS system.

In the end I wrote a script with Selenium WebDriver to automate the entry of this invoice via the browser, including uploading the supporting documentation from the EPOS (the VAT breakdown and the Z readings), but it would have been nice to be able to achieve this through a properly documented API rather than a hack.

Hmm, I take it back - I’ve been corrected! :slight_smile:

I don’t believe there are any plans to review this area at the moment, but if it does come around, I’ll bring this up.

The API documentation is created in XMLSpy directly from the XSD schemas so they should be very precise in terms of what data can be supplied.

We will have a look today at the possibility of introducing a new column to the CSV import to allow for a VAT amount to be supplied. We will know for sure how easy this will be once we’ve looked a little closer.

EDIT:

We’ve analysed this routine and it should be straightforward to extend this to support a “VatAmount” column. Much more straightforward than I had expected :slight_smile:

Great. Can I be notified when this is available?

Hi @Aspyre_Accountancy

As you’re the topic starter, you should receive an email once we update this topic.

Just make sure the box at the bottom of this page says “Watching” (below the blue reply button)

@Aspyre_Accountancy we have now completed the work to support a “Vat Amount” column on the CSV import routine. It isn’t live yet as there are a couple of other unrelated changes that need to also go into this release. I will however update you when it’s available.

3 posts were split to a new topic: Import invoices from CSV - VAT amounts are different