Accountant was in last week. Everything is squeaky clean (yay) apart from a couple of very minor, easily correctable human error type entries. He says we keep excellent records.
However we (my boss and I) and he are a little concerned about the dreaded MTD. He says that when the time comes if we start keeping our sales & purchase ledgers on a spreadsheet rather than paper, handwritten ledgers he can upload and submit them usig his software so we won't have to buy expensive software.
This led to a discussion about our invoices from suppliers. I was reading an HMRC link from one of the emails we seem to get sent from some accountancy place about how purchase invoices will have to be entered individually on the date of supply, you can't just do it once a month from a statement. I beleive that you are not supposed to do that anyway but many do and I understand why as the VAT will be pennies out if its worked backwards from a cumulative statement but we don;t actually do that and we wondered if this is going to be acceptable.
Our invoices are filed in a ringbinder and at the end of the month checked off against the statement. For context we have around 50 different suppliers and some of them we can receive up to 30-40 invoices per month. At the end of the month we add up all the nett totals, all the VAT totals and all the gross totals (check they balance) and then just enter the totals up on the purchase ledger rather than the totals of 40 different invoices.
We are hoping that this will suffice. The VAT isnt being rounded at all and it will save a LOT of time.
Hi Julie Quick one for now, on a rickety bouncy train so not easy to type.
You heard correctly that the one statement entry will not be acceptable, not to do with rounding, jusf digital tracking ridiculous nonsense as far as I'm concerned. There is a VAT notice that mentions it, I've posted it on here somewhere, can't recall the number. I have 22 in my head but I'm probably just making that up! Sure one of the boys can add it, or I will try when I get home (and before I hit the vino).
Unless of course they have back tracked since I last read it.
Sorry for dodgy typing.
-- Edited by Cheshire on Thursday 22nd of November 2018 09:43:30 PM
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Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
You need section 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 and it does state that each invoice needs to be recorded separately.
Given that you are likely to have to key in 1000 invoices plus and of course the sales invoices as well, have a look at VT Transaction +. It's ever so easy to record the data and won't really take that long to input the info you require, probably as quick as entering into a spreadsheet, but then everything is sorted on the fly for you.
It's a one of cost of £125 + VAT and then you can either send a csv file to your accountant, or if you currently file your own VAT, NJ Technologies software will let you attach the VT file and will extract the data needed to send direct to HMRC. Cost of that is currently £38 + VAT a year.
And please note this is not advice but there is a soft landing the first year and there will be no penalties if you do it the current way on a spreadsheet.
Your boss could always join a religious order that forbids the use of computers and she would be exempt.
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
Joanne, I totally agree, utter nonsense. HMRC have no idea how businesses work. We are a two woman accounts department plus the actual accountant and pretty much deal with everything between us. It's virtually the cost of another accounts assistants salary to do all this extra work. No wonder businesses are going under all the time. We've dealt with RTI (which I agree with as some firms took the michael with regards to reporting and paying PAYE). We've dealt with the extra expense & admin of auto enrolment. Plus Changes every single year to how you submit P11D's and archaic HMRC systems.
I ask because my first thought on reading this thread is that inputting supplier transactions from statements is... interesting. I see flaws and pitfalls. But if they can afford to pay two people to run the accounts department, and still the inputting needs to be done that way, then that suggests quite sizeable. (At least in the number of transactions).
As an aside - and like John says, this is definitely not advice or a suggestion, oh no, definitely not, because that would be naughty... The MTD guidelines/rules/etc state that the whole trail from first input to VAT return has to be digital, so (for example) you aren't supposed to process the VAT return by your existing method and then manually input the figures into something that can act as a bridge to submit. Software defined for that purpose, therefore, must not allow figures to be input that way.
However, there is no way based on the current spec (and looking at the actual API) for the back-end at HMRC to know if you've done that. The submission literally is just the nine-box VAT return. (John pointed this out to me a month or two back - until then, I thought [the point was] that the back-end could ask the submission software for more data).
That said, the API is still officially beta, so it could still change - and even if it remains as is for now, could become more comprehensive in future.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
There are approx 30 employees. I also do other stuff like actually typing and sending out invoices and pretty much also act as an assistant to the MD and I deal with payroll and various other admin stuff. As well as doing accounts stuff I also have various other office admin tasks.
-- Edited by pictures on Monday 26th of November 2018 10:07:49 AM
Have you looked at AutoEntry or Receiptbank. They will extract all the info from bills for you and post it to a cloud based bookkeeping package. I know I'm going to shot down on here because I'm supporting cloud bookkeeping but this morning I put a pile of 132 Travis Perkins invoices on my printer. It scanned them to my laptop. I uploaded them to AutoEntry with a few clicks of my mouse. AutoEntry is programmed to automatically post Travis Perkins invoices to my client's Quicbkooks Online file. I then went and had a cup of coffee while the bookkeeping was done for me.
Have you looked at AutoEntry or Receiptbank. They will extract all the info from bills for you and post it to a cloud based bookkeeping package. I know I'm going to shot down on here because I'm supporting cloud bookkeeping but this morning I put a pile of 132 Travis Perkins invoices on my printer. It scanned them to my laptop. I uploaded them to AutoEntry with a few clicks of my mouse. AutoEntry is programmed to automatically post Travis Perkins invoices to my client's Quicbkooks Online file. I then went and had a cup of coffee while the bookkeeping was done for me.
Did you scan them individually or were you able to scan them in bulk?
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
Scan in bulk, save to csv/excel and insert into existing accounting sheets as appropriate, be it the existing one Julie and her boss uses, or cloud or indeed desktop. No need for expensive autoentry or receiptbank. If you want to use cloud thats fine, but I still think there is a lot of chatter from various sources trying to suggest that there are certain things you can ONLY do with cloud software and/or by spending money (to apparantly save it), and this is just not true.
The argument, as the thread states, remains - why should a business be forced to do something that provides absolutely no benefit to anyone, not even HMRC in this instance.
I do think there are massive opportunities for making efficiences at this business. May be an opportunity when the current uncumbent moves on.
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Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
