26 (edited by andyseabrook 05/12/2011 02:43:26 pm)

Re: Cash Accounting for UK VAT

Hi guys new to FA. Testing it now to see if its going to provide what I was considering developing myself and it is looking good.

One of the requirements was for an application that could handle VAT cash accounting, and from my perspective it already does that indirectly. Sure you might feel you need an html wrapper around the result set and I will try to suggest a complete solution in the future, time permitting, by putting forward a php script. (Time is an issue at the moment however as I am out of work and trying to put together a business possibly around this software - i.e I am available for Bar Mitzvahs at an approriate rate)

Anyway this note might serve as a starter for anyone still toying with the Cash Accounting issue.
I did a quick test by entering a statment via phpMyAdmin and to be honest I only input a quick sample data set so a simplified "date" aspect was suitable, but of course it would actually need to be two seperate clauses >= periodStartDate AND <= periodEndDate
However this was oK for testing which was really about determining if the fields were to ambiguously named to get to the relevent data easily.

This test only takes account of Supplier Invoice and Customer Invoices but of course would need to take account of both types of credit note (trans_type 11 & 21) for anyone who needs to make the script useful. Please correct me if there are other transaction types that I have not considered which should also be included in the clause.

I have perhaps not thought it through in its entirity and certainly not in terms of some of the complications as mentioned above about exclusions from the scheme for imports for instance but this should not be a heavy issue. Of course you will want summery totals for each rate and turnover against inputs and outputs for your return. I will flesh this out further in the future for now its just a starting point and you can total these things easily in a spreadsheet template for now.

Obviously once you have your summaries that will also provide for a journal entry against your VAT libaility accounts when payments are made. Personally I dont see the need to record any data as to which items have had thier liability met as it is the total outstanding liability that is relevent. If you want to know which items are in the liability account that have never had a payment made in respect of them simply do a similar query with the table join reflecting no payment!!

SELECT ref, bank_trans.trans_no, type, trans_type, trans_date, tax_type_id, rate, net_amount,trans_tax_details.amount FROM bank_trans, trans_tax_details WHERE bank_trans.trans_no = trans_tax_details.trans_no AND (trans_type=10 OR trans_type=20) AND trans_date >= "2011-05-11"

Re: Cash Accounting for UK VAT

GarySmith wrote:

There are a few other quirks once you get down to the details but the trick is to start with the payment  and not the invoice.

Hope that makes sense.

PS. Australian GST is almost identical to UK VAT.

Gary that's exactly what I'm doing (in Aus). The UK VAT and GST systems are almost exactly the same, and for now, I'm pulling (via SQL and PHP scripts) the CASH transactions only as you describe.
These then get summed up for reporting on BAS.

By the way, a tip I found useful was to use the secondary code of the chart table to be the correct BAS item number. So, for instance, Office Expenses has G11 as its secondary ledger code. This helps when summarising.
(G11 means Non-capital purchases on the BAS statement).
My dream is to create a BAS report straight out of FA. This report would have a setup screen that allows you allocate each account to its relevant BAS report component.
The actual quarter-close transactions ie. paying your BAS etc. are being handled manually at the moment as its a bit difficult to get FA to 'code' a set of transactions, but this could be done too.

By the way, I also use e-record, and have written a script that takes the e-record transactions and turns them into the format required by 'Import Multijournal Transactions'. I can then import all my payments/deposits straight into FA. I've rewritten the Multijournal Transactions screens for FA 2.34 and will post soon. If anyone's interested in the (basic) e-record data translator, let me know in this post.

Pete

Re: Cash Accounting for UK VAT

Has this been answered with https://frontaccounting.com/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=4042

Has anyone in the UK tested the extension - and how easy is it to sort out the liabilities etc.

Cheers,

bailey86