apologies for the newbie question, I’m sure I’m missing something basic here,
basically I manage all my invoices manually and I intend to use quickfile mainly for VAT accounting.
before I’ve used excel as I only have a couple of clients under vat scope so my vat is fairly uncomplicated.
anyway, to this end I’ve imported my bank statements for the vat period, updated a starting balance and tagged everything in 2 main client categories: income from clients to which I charged vat and non vatable ones. same for expenses.
however when I go to vat reporting the system seems to be considering the entire revenue rather than filter out the non vatable elements.
not sure if it requires invoices to work properly or how should I go about this? currently I’ve set quickfile to cash accounting.
many thanks in advance!
What do you mean by this? Whether you charge VAT is a function of what you’re selling, not who you’re selling it to (apart from odd cases like overseas sales).
What exactly do you mean by “considering”? All your sales including zero rated should be counted in box 6, but only the sales that are 20% or 5% VAT will contribute to box 1.
thanks for your assistance Ian! I’m one of those odd cases, I provide services mainly to overseas clients.
all my sales are indeed included in box 6 but box 1 is exactly 20% of that, so the system doesnt seem to be taking into account the clients that I’ve tagged as being 0% vat , if that makes sense?
or I suppose I must have done that wrong so any help on setting this correctly would be much appreciated!
thanks Paul, so other than tagging I must issue invoices for every transaction in my statement? these are all past transactions that are already paid I don’t quite need to handle invoices in quickfile, would there be another way or?
How did you tag the bank transactions? Presumably as “payment from a customer” if they’re appearing in the VAT return but did you create an invoice for each one or just assign it to the client account as a prepayment?
that’s correct, tagges as payment from customer but I didn’t create any invoice, just assigned to client account.
as it asks the vat on that step I assumed it was good to go.
VAT returns in QuickFile are primarily driven by invoices and purchases, as that is the only place where the final amount of VAT is crystallised.
The reason it asks for VAT at the payment stage is that on Cash Accounting the VAT on a pre- or part-payment is due in the quarter when the payment was received even if the invoice isn’t raised until later. So when you log an unallocated payment QuickFile asks roughly how much of it was VAT and then if the payment still hasn’t been allocated to an invoice by the time you do the return it uses that estimate of the liability to fill in the box. When you do later allocate the payment it adjusts the next return if necessary to handle any difference between the actual VAT declared on the invoices and the estimate derived from the payments.
Going forward I presume you will be generating invoices using QuickFile so it’ll be fine from now on, but to account for the past ones it should be sufficient to create one invoice per client on the quarter end date with the total you invoiced that client during the quarter, set the correct VAT rate and log payment with “apply from credit” to assign the existing pre-payments to that invoice.
You only get “apply from credit” if the client has an unused prepayment balance (in the matching currency, if you have multi currency mode enabled) and you’re paying down a single invoice - you don’t get it if you’ve selected several invoice checkboxes in the list and try to pay them all off in one go.