Ok I made a major error! I am close/need to now register for vat, So upon researching what i need to do (totally new to the VAT world) I made the mistake of entering VAT on purchases made recently and over the last tax year (a forum i read said to start logging vat to back date any and I just ticked it on quickfile without making more enquiries, me being a complete idiot!) not a long period of time but over 100s of receipts now include VAT that need to not include VAT!
My accountant has just called in a panic with the late submission that VAT shouldnt be being deducted in the P and L until I am actually registered and that I need to remove VAT from these 100s of purchases… I was praying that unticking VAT on the settings would remove it but it still remains on all my purchases…
Is there a bulk option or any options where i can remove VAT from all my purchase entries without going through hundreds of them one by one?
I don’t think there’s any way to do it in bulk via the user interface, it’s probably scriptable via the API, but depending exactly what the problem is you might not actually need to fix the individual purchases themselves, it may be sufficient to just counteract their effects with a journal.
If I’m reading this right, your accountant is doing your 2020-21 tax return (due on Monday), but there are some purchases during that year where you’ve recorded VAT in QuickFile when you shouldn’t have as you were not VAT registered at the time?
If this is correct, then the quickest fix just to get your 2020-21 P&L correct would be:
unzip your latest account backup (or create one now if you don’t already have a backup schedule)
open the Purchase_Invoice_Items.csv in Excel/Google sheets or similar
this will show you all the individual lines of all your purchases, including the net total, VAT total, and nominal code for each line
sort by RECEIPT_DATE and filter the list to include only the purchases and credit notes in the appropriate accounting period, deleting all the older and more recent rows
create a pivot table from this data
NOMINAL_CODE as the rows
sum of VAT_TOTAL_GBP as the values
This should tell you the total amount of VAT you’ve mistakenly recorded against each nominal code in the relevant time period, so now you can simply create a journal on the last day of the relevant period that debits each of these nominal codes by the relevant VAT amount (credit if any of the numbers are negative) and puts the balancing credit entry for the grand total onto the “purchase tax control account”.
This journal will reverse all the VAT you recorded on your purchases, leaving you with the same P&L as you would have had, had you recorded them without itemising the VAT in the first place (with the whole inc-VAT total allocated to the purchase code). You can verify this is the case by checking your year end balance sheet, on which the purchase tax control account should no longer appear (as its balance is now zero).
You should do a similar journal dated during this tax year to fix this year’s P&L in the same way.
Note that the purchases will still look like they have VAT itemised, so when you do end up registering for VAT then you must set your “VAT start date” in your QuickFile settings so it does not attempt to include all your pre-registration purchases in your first VAT return. Any purchases on which you do want to reclaim pre-registration VAT will have to be entered as manual adjustments on that first return.