Morning all,
I was just on the Agent VAT portal (the old one, haven't touched MTD yet) as I'm doing very late accounts for a last minuter. I needed to see the figures filed for the first two quarters of the financial year but, with the accounts being so late, they're not shown under "view submitted returns".
Anyway, I discovered that if you click on the oldest one available, the URL for the page will be https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/vat-file/trader/<VAT number>/period/###/return where ### is a three digit number. This is the number of the period and older ones can be accessed by manually changing this to the number for the earlier period.
I think the number is the month [citation needed] so to access my older periods I took three off, then three off again to get the two quarters prior to the one I was linked to. Thought it might come in handy for anyone else with a similar issue, I have no idea how far back you can go but you can at least get a couple more than they'll link you to.
Replies (6)
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Good tip.
Not sure I'll be using it a lot but it's good to know for those troublesome new clients who come along.
That's invaluable. Just tried it going back to 2011 and it works perfectly.
Thanks Duggimon
Frankly, this is brilliant. Simple but brilliant.
I have bookmarked the page for future reference and I am also wondering whether this methodology might resolve data access issues for other taxes on the HMRC systems.
You never know!
Curious, this means HMRC is storing all this useful data - but not allowing users to (easily) access it.
it would take a programmer a matter of an hour or so to publically extend the list back to the opening point of the database with a basic search function.