Please help as I am overdue submitting my Oct-Dec 2023 VAT return. I have only two invoices with invoice dates and pay dates in October but when I prepare my 4Q VAT return these are not picked up and the total is zero, so I cannot upload to HMRC. I am on Cash accounting and have successfully submitted in previous quarter. I note I has a sale last quarter with an invoice date in September but payment date in October. Is this the problem? Some quick advice would be much appreciated.
Firstly don’t panic as you’re not overdue - Oct to Dec deadline is 7th Feb, i.e. next Wednesday.
Is there anything at all in the CSV that you get when you use the “export” button on the return preparation screen? That’s the first place to look as it details every item that QuickFile thinks should belong to this return and any adjustments it has made if, for example, you previously declared a pre-payment at a higher vat rate but later assigned it to an invoice that is zero rated.
If there’s nothing at all in that export then someone from support will probably need to take a look from their side.
Hello @Rosy
I have only two invoices with invoice dates and pay dates in October.
I have take a look at your account and I can see 2 invoices dated in October ( #59007X and #103493X) teh payments allocated to these are dated in January.
The vat return (under cash accounting) looks at the payment dates (the tax point) to assign them to the correct return.
If these payment dates are incorrect you can view them in the bank screen, click on the dates and edit the dates.
Thank you so much for your help, Ian. There is nothing in the exported CSV file, but I am looking at QFSteve’s suggestions now.
Thanks very much, QFSteve. Yes, there are two invoices with issue dates of 5 Oct and 12 Oct with 14 days payment terms. I marked them as Paid in January when I was preparing the invoices and I see now it must have taken this as the date that the payment was made. I will try edit in the bank tool, but I can’t remember having linked my QuickFile account to my bank account when I started on QuickFile. Perhaps I can delete these two entries and re-submit them making sure the payment date was last October and not the day that I update the record. I feel I see the light now at least, so am really appreciative of your help. I will give it a go tomorrow and let you know how I get on.
Every customer and supplier payment in QuickFile is linked to some sort of bank transaction, whether it’s one that was imported from a linked feed or one that was created automatically in the background when you did “log payment” on an invoice.
If you go to the invoice then click on the link across the top to the payment (or payments) that is linked to the invoice then there may be a way from there to navigate directly to the bank transaction. But even if there isn’t it’ll tell you which account and which date, and you can find the matching transaction yourself from that information.
Thank you very much Steve and Ian! You are lifesavers and I have now finally managed to submit my 4Q23 VAT return. For the benefit of other users: I could not find the bank entries (maybe as I am on the free version?), but I deleted my two invoices are re-created them. I used the ‘Log a Payment’ route rather than just marking as ‘Paid’ to make sure it had the payment date in the same quarter. Hey presto, the transactions were then feeding through to the VAT Report. It is odd I didn’t have this problem in previous quarters, but maybe I was more cautious and took the ‘Log a Payment’ route. When it came to submitting I had an error message from HMRC saying that there was a connection issue. I clicked the Roll Back button and re-submitted and it worked.
I think MTD is a killer for average users to get to grips with. QuickFiles is good, but some more tips along the way about payment dates would save a lot of grief, particularly as there is no phone to call or chat function, but this forum was great. Needing a separate log-in and password for it though is another hurdle.
Overall, I am very relieved to have got through this quarter and greatly appreciate the help from Ian and Steve, so wanted to give some feedback that might help others.
For future reference for anyone else who finds this thread, this is what I meant by navigating from the invoice to the payment to the bank transaction:
On the invoice preview page, once an invoice has been paid there will be a link1 at the top above the preview to the payment that is linked to the invoice:
Clicking this link takes you to the payment detail page:
The pencil icon by “account” lets you change which account the payment is made from, and the “View bank entry” button at the top takes you to the transaction in the relevant bank account, where you can modify the date.
1 if the invoice is part-paid with more than one payment, then instead of a direct link to a single payment record the link will say “Click here to view all payments attributed to this invoice”, and will take you to a page that in turn links to the individual payments.
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