Vat help

pipkin71

AbbieCadabra wrote: »

can't offer anything on VAT but we're very happy with our online accountancy service. we used a local 'old school' accountant for years as we didn't know any better, old fashioned, slow with advice & never really explained things, charged us over £2k per year for the privilege too!

I keep all our accounts simply on excel docs & send them online at our year end. accountant doesn't usually have any queries or need to send any actual documents to her either. basic queries are answered straight away by email, you can have more involved advice/guidance but think this would cost extra. we pay £650 per year inc. vat. we use http://www.cheapaccounting.co.uk/index.php

That's really useful info, thanks for posting

Slinky

For anybody else coming across this situation, what the accountant should have told you was that you should have issued pro-forma invoices for the full amount, say £120 if you intended it to be £100+VAT, with a note on the invoice that you were awaiting registration and a proper VAT invoice would be issued when your VAT number was received. I had to do this when I registered, there was a real backlog at that particular time (nearly 10 years ago so I can't remember why now), and I had to wait several weeks before I got the number.


This is simple stuff, if your accountant couldn't tell you you should do this, kick them in to touch and find somebody better.


Just for clarification, you must not split the gross amount down on the pro forma, you should only show a split involving VAT on a proper VAT invoice.