I'm a partner with Burton Sweet, chartered accountants & business advisers, and run the Shepton Mallet office down in beautiful Somerset. Despite the name, Shepton Mallet is actually the home of Glastonbury Festival! I trained in audit and corporate tax with Grant Thornton and came to my current position in 1991 via small local practices and a stint with a training consortium.
I have the distinction of being one of the original members of the AccountingWEB editorial team, having been a freelance writer here for a year or so before John Stockdyk joined!
I had a client who registered for Flat Rate VAT in mid-2013 but didn't tell us. We submitted 2 or 3 three returns I think and then has HMRC write to query them. We had to provide Flat Rate calculations from Day 1 and the client had to pay an assessment because they had zero rated sales which became liable to Flat Rate VAT, while losing all the Input Tax claims.
I got the impression HMRC's software would generate an alert for their staff to follow up if you put figures in the Inputs and Input Tax boxes while registered for the Flat Rate. The fact that they haven't might indicate that they took your client off the scheme, but that doesn't seem to be normal practice in my experience.
Let's hope this is some isolated aberration. On the continent the custom is to use a dot as the thousands separator and a comma as the decimal point. Heaven forbid we go down that route!
... and got a lot out of them. Yes, AVN is expensive, but then they provide an awful lot of software tools, training, support and consultancy. You have to commit to using them or you'll just be wasting your money, but members who embrace it all do seem to get a lot out of them.
2020 is a cheaper option, get you some basic software plus fee or reduced price training and conferences. But again, if you never use any of their services it's going to look like poor value for money, whatever it costs!
Both 2020 and AVN offer free or cheap events you can visit as a non-member so you can size them up, I suggest you check out their websites and try them.
No so sure, Phil. It sounds like an industrial injury which arose in the carrying out of his duties for his employer. There's no obvious duality as there was in Prince v Mapp [1969] 46TC169 so I can't see why the company shouldn't pay for the treatment as a business expense, with no benefit in kind to the director.
Thanks for that clarification, I too was concerned about having dozens of payrolls with just under LEL employees. Let's beware to HMRC trying to muddy the water on this. I come across the same with other HMRC online filing, especially CT. Just because I could file a nil CT return doesn't mean I should! These online systems are only a mechanism to satisfy the existing regulations, they don't extend them.
In my experience only Sage has the controls you need to properly handle VAT cash accounting - if that's likely to be an issue for you. QuickBooks may be able to do it, but it seems clients can easily by-pass whatever the controls are.
And why did Intuit think it was a good idea to allow QB users to turn off the audit trail?
We use Practice Engine for time/fees but the workflow is unuseable. We are playing with our own Intranet workflow solution at the moment, but currently we find T-cards for records in and in progress, and a big whiteboard for staff work planning does the job just fine!
While I'm not the biggest fan of Sage, we and our clients do use it extensively. The report-writing functionality in the higher versions of Sage 50 should enable you to overcome any deficiencies in the reports provided. Failing that, you can easily set up your own reports in Excel and use macros to extract the data live from Sage. In reality, there's very little you CAN'T do with Sage data!
My answers
Surprised HMRC haven't spotted it
I had a client who registered for Flat Rate VAT in mid-2013 but didn't tell us. We submitted 2 or 3 three returns I think and then has HMRC write to query them. We had to provide Flat Rate calculations from Day 1 and the client had to pay an assessment because they had zero rated sales which became liable to Flat Rate VAT, while losing all the Input Tax claims.
I got the impression HMRC's software would generate an alert for their staff to follow up if you put figures in the Inputs and Input Tax boxes while registered for the Flat Rate. The fact that they haven't might indicate that they took your client off the scheme, but that doesn't seem to be normal practice in my experience.
I hope we're not going all EU
Let's hope this is some isolated aberration. On the continent the custom is to use a dot as the thousands separator and a comma as the decimal point. Heaven forbid we go down that route!
Been there, joined most of them
... and got a lot out of them. Yes, AVN is expensive, but then they provide an awful lot of software tools, training, support and consultancy. You have to commit to using them or you'll just be wasting your money, but members who embrace it all do seem to get a lot out of them.
2020 is a cheaper option, get you some basic software plus fee or reduced price training and conferences. But again, if you never use any of their services it's going to look like poor value for money, whatever it costs!
Both 2020 and AVN offer free or cheap events you can visit as a non-member so you can size them up, I suggest you check out their websites and try them.
Worth a go
No so sure, Phil. It sounds like an industrial injury which arose in the carrying out of his duties for his employer. There's no obvious duality as there was in Prince v Mapp [1969] 46TC169 so I can't see why the company shouldn't pay for the treatment as a business expense, with no benefit in kind to the director.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/eimanual/EIM32870.htm offers a glimmer of hope I think, it's worth exploring.
Thanks EGo
Thanks for that clarification, I too was concerned about having dozens of payrolls with just under LEL employees. Let's beware to HMRC trying to muddy the water on this. I come across the same with other HMRC online filing, especially CT. Just because I could file a nil CT return doesn't mean I should! These online systems are only a mechanism to satisfy the existing regulations, they don't extend them.
VAT Cash Accounting
In my experience only Sage has the controls you need to properly handle VAT cash accounting - if that's likely to be an issue for you. QuickBooks may be able to do it, but it seems clients can easily by-pass whatever the controls are.
And why did Intuit think it was a good idea to allow QB users to turn off the audit trail?
Fantastic
Must get hold of this book, he sounds fascinating!
Low tech has a lot going for it
We use Practice Engine for time/fees but the workflow is unuseable. We are playing with our own Intranet workflow solution at the moment, but currently we find T-cards for records in and in progress, and a big whiteboard for staff work planning does the job just fine!
Taxman does it for me
The Beatles version if I'm feeling fairly relaxed, Stevie Ray Vaughan's version if I need to step up a gear!
Don't give up on Sage
While I'm not the biggest fan of Sage, we and our clients do use it extensively. The report-writing functionality in the higher versions of Sage 50 should enable you to overcome any deficiencies in the reports provided. Failing that, you can easily set up your own reports in Excel and use macros to extract the data live from Sage. In reality, there's very little you CAN'T do with Sage data!