As a new forum user, it helps the rest of us to help you if you provide a little background information about yourself. It allows us to gauge your abilities and therefore pitch our responses better. Having said that, I'll try to answer the question anyway...
How did they calculate each quarter if they didn't reconcile the previous one(s)? There are two fairly obvious answers that spring to mind, one of which ('a' below) is 'easy' but likely to miss things off the returns, and the other ('b' below) is more involved but also more accurate.
Method 'a' is that they may have fed the dates into Sage and chose to exclude previously unreconciled transactions - so each return is based on the transactions input that relate to the relevant period, but won't take into account transactions from the previous periods that were input late.
Method 'b' is that they did include the unreconciled transactions - which would include everything - and then manually subtracted the previous returns from the figures.
I guess would be that they did 'a' based on previous experience, mixed in with a little cynicism regarding the way people do things - which is to say 'the easiest way possible. Plus, if they submitted the returns from within Sage, they would have been submitting increasingly high returns UNLESS they used approach 'a' - if they used 'b' they would have had to submit manually.
If so means there is a possibility that previous returns are inaccurate. How likely this is depends on their record keeping in general. Anything like my best client and the returns will be accurate, so no problems - but anything like my worst, and those returns are going to be inaccurate; and in this case while the discrepancies will be immaterial from one return to the next, cumulatively they will be much more material.
The good news is that subject to those discrepancies it should be an easy 'fix'. You simply need to do the next return using method 'b'. Double check the last return that they did reconcile - everything should tally. Then do the next return for the right period, but deduct the cumulative figures from each of the interim returns for every box; the result will be the amounts for the quarter. Submit the return manually, and then (IIRC) there's an option in Sage to flag the return as submitted manually. Job done.
The bad news, though, is that the easiest way to determine the level of discrepancies that I can think of is to run each interim VAT return in Sage - which is, in essence, what you say you don't want to do. C'est la vie.
(Having said that, consider that it's only 7 or 8 returns, depending when their quarter is.)
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Thank you for your reply.
I have used sage for years but have never experienced anything quite like this.
To reconcile the returns they printed sales invoice summary, credit summary, purchase invoice summary and credits for that period and worked the Vat manually that way.
Looking on Sage there have not been any transactions reconciled for years .
I try to pretend the VAT schemes other than the main two don't exist, so I tend to forget about them in contexts like this. :)
But any version of Sage newer than the scheme in question should be able to cope - so as well as asking about the scheme in use, what version of Sage are they running?
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
