VAT Period changes and change from cash accounting to accrual accounting

Hi,

I need to change my VAT accounting to fall in line with my year end date. Is there a way I can do this?

Also my accountant has asked me to change VAT accounting from cash to accural. How would I do this?

Thanks
Ashley

Hello @ashleyrice

You can change these settings in Reports > VAT Returns Settings

I would check with your accountant if you have to inform HMRC about the changes.
(I am not a registered accountant nor bookkeeper)

Note that when you change from cash to accrual accounting you will need to make a one-off manual adjustment to your next return. By default QuickFile will include all your invoices and purchases right back to your original “VAT start date” (or back to when you started using QuickFile, if you haven’t set a VAT start date), since by design it includes any items up to the quarter end date that have not been locked by a previous return. Cash accounting returns lock payments, accrual accounting returns lock invoices, so the first accrual return will see nothing as “already locked”.

You might be able to work around this by changing your configured VAT start date to the start of your first accrual quarter (I’m not sure whether or not this is allowed - @QFSteve?) but even then you will have to make adjustments for the change of accounting method - essentially you need to deduct anything where you’ve made or received a payment in the previous quarter for something not invoiced until this quarter, and then add back anything invoiced in the previous quarter but not paid until this one, in order to make sure you’ve accounted for VAT exactly once on every item with nothing either missed out or counted twice.

You may wish to have your accountant verify the adjustments before you submit.

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