First MTD VAT return!

and what a faff

Didn't find your answer?

Yahoo didn't likeTaxfiler but google chrome did. Taxfiler didn't like my spreadsheet and thought £1.60 minus £0.80 came to 79p even though the excel spreadsheet it took those numbers from clearly shows box 5 ending in eighty pence. I went back to the original spreadsheet and manually typed in the VAT due, which makes a mockery of 'digital'

I don't like MTD and like HS2, cannot for the life of me see what the point of it is.

Rant over - It's Friday and I'm soon off to the pub!

Replies (19)

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By Duggimon
19th Jul 2019 14:11

What the heck is Yahoo?

What spreadsheets display isn't always what is in the cell, you need to use formulas for rounding if you want that to be the case.

I expect Taxfiler was rounding down in the client's favour, like all good accountants.

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Replying to Duggimon:
By SteveHa
19th Jul 2019 14:46

Duggimon wrote:

I expect Taxfiler was rounding down in the client's favour, like all good accountants.

And HMRC. HMRC always round in the taxpayer's favour (reliefs round up, deductions and liabilities round down).

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d
By puzzel
19th Jul 2019 14:59

Yahoo dates back to the days of dial-up internet.

Some e-mail extensions (hotmail etc) will not communicate with Yahoo.

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By nodrogbir
19th Jul 2019 15:36

MTD is gonna throw up some massive errors - just wait and see. The horrors I am coming across are quite frightening. Daft thing is HMRC won't even know lol .

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the sea otter
By memyself-eye
19th Jul 2019 15:44

it wasn't a rounding issue, I checked - apparently taxfiler has/had a glitch. No doubt it will be sorted by October.
I had no problem in the past with SA/CT tax returns via taxfiler using 'Yahoo' as the browser - I prefer it to Google.

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Replying to memyself-eye:
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By johnhemming
19th Jul 2019 16:01

It may be that Taxfiler processes numbers as floating point numbers. That is stored as an exponent and mantissa in binary.

What happens if you do that is that 0.01 is a recurring number (in binary). Hence you find that numbers don't add up properly in decimal.

This is a design issue. What they should do is to store currency values as pennies rather than pounds. Or as big numbers with a number of decimal points. (which is much the same)

I have seen these problems many times before and they often cause trial balances to be out by just a little bit.

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Replying to johnhemming:
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By John Stone
19th Jul 2019 16:11

John - I wasn't originally going to the pub - but having read your post - I'm joining memyself. I need a drink....now!

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Replying to johnhemming:
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By John Stone
19th Jul 2019 16:11

John - I wasn't originally going to the pub - but having read your post - I'm joining memyself. I need a drink....now!

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Replying to John Stone:
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By johnhemming
19th Jul 2019 16:57

have two.

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Replying to memyself-eye:
By Duggimon
19th Jul 2019 17:06

Do Yahoo make a browser? That was a serious question in my first post, I had no idea.

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Replying to Duggimon:
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By johnhemming
19th Jul 2019 19:43

There is a Yahoo Axis browser about which I know little.

There is a website called "caniuse" which compares the javascript implementations of various browsers. I would not think it was worth even thinking of using a browser not on that list as it is unlikely to have any really usable implementation of javascript.

Here is an example from that site.
https://caniuse.com/#search=formdata

You will see there are just under 20 browser types analysed.

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Replying to memyself-eye:
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By legerman
20th Jul 2019 12:33

memyself-eye wrote:

it wasn't a rounding issue, I checked - apparently taxfiler has/had a glitch. No doubt it will be sorted by October.
I had no problem in the past with SA/CT tax returns via taxfiler using 'Yahoo' as the browser - I prefer it to Google.

Yahoo browser doesn't exist. Do you mean the browser you are using (likely to be either Chrome, Firefox or internet explorer/edge) opens up Yahoo as the start page.

It won't matter which browser you use as the "error" is with Taxfiler processing the excel cells.

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Replying to legerman:
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By johnhemming
20th Jul 2019 14:07

There is a yahoo browser for ios and I think it is still available although you are probably right in that the OP is referring to the home page.

If anyone wants to find out what browser they are using this is a good link. (Browsers normally tell servers what they are when they get web pages)

https://www.whatsmybrowser.org/

There are lots and lots of browsers. I even wrote one in 1995 to interoperate for cryptography, but it is probably best to stick to Chrome for now.

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Tornado
By Tornado
19th Jul 2019 18:20

If you set a cell to display 2 decimal points or perhaps 0 decimal points to give an integer number, that does not mean that the cell contains an integer number or a number of 2 decimal places. The number in the cell could contain a number of 10, 20 or more decimal places, and this can arise if the number in the cell has been arrived at through a series of processing other cell data already. Adding these cells together may not display the correct total although the cell will contain the correct total which can be seen only if you set it to display the necessary number of decimal places.

It is important to ensure that any cells that contain a total or result of processing information from other cells, contains a formula that rounds the result to the required final number of decimal places using the ROUNDUP or ROUNDDOWN macros.

Rounding errors are a nuisance but can be avoided by ensuring that formula results include rounding to a smaller decimal place, typically 2 decimal places for VAT.

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Replying to Tornado:
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By johnhemming
19th Jul 2019 19:45

I don't know enough about the implementation, but it strikes me that this is not something in Excel, but in Taxfiler and I don't know how Taxfiler works.

Javascript tends to use floating point numbers which can cause problems for systems that use js for money calculations.

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Replying to johnhemming:
By SteveHa
19th Jul 2019 23:35

It's why I always use ROUNDUP/ROUNDDOWN in my spreadsheets - dumps the superfluous carp before it gets used.

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Replying to Tornado:
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By Lisa R
22nd Jul 2019 10:26

There is also an option in excel to "set precision as displayed". I find it useful to tick that box when working on spreadsheets with formulas where you want to make sure all the cash amounts add up to what it actually shows in the columns.

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the sea otter
By memyself-eye
22nd Jul 2019 11:22

The browser is Internet Explorer version 11 with 'Yahoo' as the homepage.....

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Replying to memyself-eye:
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By johnhemming
22nd Jul 2019 11:34

IE is definitely a browser to avoid.

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