[GNC] UK VAT and "Making Tax Digital"

[Maf. King]

On Sunday, 17 February 2019 12:23:39 GMT Maf. King wrote:
> On Sunday, 17 February 2019 11:57:58 GMT Christopher Lam wrote:
> > I can amend Income-GST-statement, which is tailor-made for periodic
> > GST/VAT returns, to output CSV or XML. But so far there's little demand
> > nor willing beta-testers.
> 
> *Raises Hand in the Air*  I'll volunteer to test.  With the caveat that my
> VAT is not normally very complicated.
> 
> The GST report I ran earlier this morning spat out numbers which matched my
> last quarter's return (generated from customised options to transaction
> reports), which is a good start!
> 
> Maf.

Further to this,  I've found and downloaded a bridging spreadsheet for 
LibreOffice (for free, without even having to register an email address) from 
https://filemyvatreturn.co.uk/download/  (seems to be a "trading name" for CHM 
software, https://www.chm-software.co.uk/companies where you do have to 
register to download...)

No endorsement or recommendation to use them, I'm not even a satisfied user 
(yet).  Seems that it will cost £7.50 for each VAT return to be filed. But 
gotta make a start somewhere.  If anyone else knows of other options, please 
do chime into this thread.

According to their help file, all you need is a spreadsheet (or sheets) that 
contain the 7 relevant box totals that you link into the downloaded sheet.  It 
may be possible to tweak it to (automagically) fill from a CSV file, I'll need 
to look at that next month when I have some more time.

I will note that depending on how orderly the exit from the EU ends up, the 7 
box totals required may change - but we're not going to know how that 
particular cookie is going to crumble yet...

Christopher: what sort of timescale do you think you'll need to tweak the GST 
report etc to give CSV out?  There is a clear workflow to export from GC to 
Calc and munge the totals there so it isn't especially critical, despite the 
first digital filings being due early August. But it seems to me that if a new 
workflow can be figured out in time, why tweak the old way first then change a 
quarter or two later? 

I'm pretty busy the rest of this month, but will do more digging into this in 
March.  

Maf.