Journal VAT to show on VAT Return

[Danny]

If I journal to either of the VAT nominal codes, they show on the chart of accounts, but it does not get included on the VAT Report. Am I doing something wrong?

[ian_roberts]

QuickFile vat returns only take data from the sales and purchase invoices, not journals. What are you trying to do, someone might be able to suggest a better way to achieve it?

[Danny]

My company has 4 sites. So I need to record my sales figures in a way that doesn’t loose any reporting definition. EPOS figures for card sales hit the bank acc and I am tagging them to 4 nominal codes in sales. Cash sales are still sat waiting for me to work out what to do with them…

[ian_roberts]

With my EPOS the daily Z readings give me the total net and VAT amounts and the cash/card breakdown. I create a sales invoice in QuickFile from each Z read - set the net amount, set the vat rate to 20% and then manually override the vat amount to match the Z read - then log two payments against the invoice, petty cash for the cash sales and a holding bank account for cards. The invoice should now show as fully paid up.

When the card settlement amounts arrive in my current account they are treated as a bank transfer from the holding account, and when I pay in cash it’s a bank transfer from the petty cash account.

To split the sales from different sites you could either use different nominal codes for the invoices from each site or use project tags.

[ian_roberts]

Note that while this sounds like a lot of faff it can be pretty much entirely automated - I have written code that takes the Z reads directly from my EPOS web based back end and creates the QuickFile invoices via the API, then the settlement payments are covered by automatic bank tagging rules.

[Danny]

That sounds perfect. Will it be able to deal with card and cash sales without mixing them together? Will it be able to deal with the four sites without mixing them together?

[ian_roberts]

@Danny

Will it be able to deal with card and cash sales without mixing them together?

Under my system you have one invoice whose value is the total of all sales (cash plus card) with two part-payments for the card amount and the cash amount. That’s probably enough, if you want to get a cash total or card total for a given month you can do that by querying the payments rather than the invoices.

@Danny

Will it be able to deal with the four sites without mixing them together

If you make a separate invoice for each individual Z read then you could either treat each site as a separate “client” in QuickFile terms or assign a “project” tag to each invoice to group things together by site. Project tags are the way to go if you want to also track which purchases pertain to which site so you can do a site-by-site P&L report.

[Danny]

Thanks Ian, that answers my queries perfectly. I am expecting cash to be a bit of a nightmare, so I might manually raise sales invoices monthly for card and cash separately.

I was going to raise the four sites as four separate customers, but it appears I need to do a bit of reading up on ‘Project Tagging’. At the moment, I am using four different nominal codes for crucial expense. eg. Gas site 1, gas site 2, gas site 3, gas site 4, etc. I am thinking ‘Project Tagging’ might prove to be much simpler, and much clearer regarding reporting…

Thanks for your help.

[QFMathew]

Hi @Danny

It certainly sounds like project tagging may be of a benefit to you.

You can read more about them here:

Projects in QuickFile

Introduction Projects offer a simple way to group together your sales, expenses, estimates and purchase orders into a single container. This makes it easier to report on a specific activity within your business for example a project you’re working on for a client or perhaps a new division in your sales team. We’ve designed the project system to be as flexible as possible by relying on what we call project tags. Essentially you can apply tags to any of your sales invoices and purchase invoices …

You can add up to 5 per invoice or estimate, and can, as @ian_roberts mentions, produce a P&L for a specific tag.

You may also be interested in this tool which could help input sales in bulk:

Cash Register Tool

Introduction If your business operates a cash register then no doubt you will have realised that logging each customer transaction to a unique invoice in QuickFile is not practical. In such cases what you would typically do is log your daily, weekly or even monthly totals to a lump sum invoice and pay that invoice to a cash account in the banking section. Where can I find the Cash Register Tool? The Cash Register tool is located in the Sales tab (Enter cash register takings). How does the Cas…

Hope that helps!

[ian_roberts]

If it helps you visualise things, this is what I get from my EPOS each day:

From which I generate this invoice in QuickFile:

And apply these two payments: