VAT Refund - explaining on bank imports?

Question asked by Paul Barnes 9 years ago

As some of our revenue is from sales to EU and outside EU, and most of of Cost of Sales is UK, we are often in a refund situation. We have HMRC approval to submit monthly on this basis. Just setting up on Clearbooks.

Our year end is end April so I needed to set up opening balances incl VAT Control. My March return was a £12,000 refund so I entered it as a negative amount in a bill coded to VAT Control - to get it into the creditors accounts. My April return was a payment of £400 So my 2 entries in opening balance as Bills are: +£400 bill - VAT Control -£12000 bill - VAT Control

The issue now is I have a bank import to explain including the £12,000 refund from March VAT return.
This is showing as a Receipt and so it won't prompt me to match it against the "minus £12000" Bill unpaid.

Should I set up HMRC as a "customer & supplier" and handle the transaction like a sale / revenue receipt? ie create an invoice coded to VAT Control and match the bank receipt against the "invoice"? That sounds not right - but is it just a way to get the amount into the account with the correct CR/DR into the VAT Control account? If that's the case do I void the Bill and start with an invoice instead?

This is a regular thing so as well as fixing the current transaction I need to know how best to do it going forwards. I haven't yet done the first monthly VAT return on Clearbooks (and it is a payment rather than a refund this month) How does Clearbooks handle it as a refund - does it generate an invoice at the time of "Create VAT Return"?

The £400 Bill is fine - on the bank import it has flagged this up to match the £400 payment from the bank to HMRC and so mark the bill as paid.

3 Replies

Hi Paul,

What you have done is 100% correct. Normally on when explaining the imported statement the next set would be to select the receipt, click on the Refund tab, select HMRC from the contacts list and finally hit the Add transaction button beside the appropriate bill:

file

For some reason the system is currently doubling up the amount due which it hasn't done in the past and preventing this step from working. I have escalated to the technical team to fix this asap.

In the mean time if you would like to mark this bill as paid - click on the PRF bill ID and use the quick pay form to the bottom right to make payment.

I will let you know as soon as this is resolved.

Thanks John. That all worked using the quick pay. HOWEVER (!!) it seems to have created a new issue on the dashboard, where the VAT refund doesn't seem to have been picked up in the running VAT total. My real VAT liability is £5,000 - using the clearbooks VAT report. But the dashboard is saying it is £17,000 - ie the £12,000 refund above hasn't gone into the account properly?

Any advice?

got the same issue as Paul. I made a VAT pre payment to HMRC and recorded it via bank account money out against VAT control but this pre-payment is not being picked up by the dash board's current running VAT summary and still shows the total sum without having subtracted the pre-payment amount

thanks

Ralph

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