Release version

These changes affect all VAT Registered users, regardless of your country, so please take a moment to find out how they may impact you.

New functionality has been introduced allowing full reporting of EU transactions for UK organisations. All transactions in which you specify a VAT Code will now have a new field called VAT Treatment. This field allows the user to indicate whether the VAT transaction relates to dealings with UK, EU or other International Customers/Suppliers. The VAT Treatment is then used to correctly compile your VAT Report and update the reporting Boxes relevant to transactions with non-UK parties.

How does this affect you? Well, that depends on your situation:

1. I am not registered for VAT
Jackpot! You are not directly affected by these changes. You will, however, need to download the new Import templates if you import Customers, Suppliers or Invoices.

2. I am registered for VAT but don't transact with EU Customers or Suppliers
Don't sweat, you'll hardly even notice! As above, you will need to download the new Import templates. There is one very important change you need to be aware. The new VAT Treatment field will be available on certain transactions and in most cases you can just leave the default. The one exception is if you are processing a refund or return using the bank transactions Receive Money or Spend Money (with Type 'General'). In such cases, you will need to change the default VAT Treatment. Please read more about this at the top of VAT UK - Box by Box.

3. I am registered for VAT and transact with EU Customers or Suppliers
Double jackpot! AccountsPortal now provides for full EU VAT Reporting. You are also affected by the items mentioned in 1. & 2. above so please review these before reading about the new EU VAT features.

• Transactions relating to an EU or International Customers/Suppliers can be identified by selecting the appropriate VAT Treatment.
• Customer VAT Numbers are now printed on Invoices and Credit Notes.
• EC Sales List introduced as a new report.
• Bank Import Rules have been updated to store VAT Treatment. Please edit your existing rules where necessary.
• Import templates have been updated. You will need to download the new templates before importing any data.
• Recurring Invoices for EU and International Customers/Suppliers will need to be updated regarding VAT Treatment.

If you have the time, we recommend you visit the HMRC website to find out more about VAT reporting requirements for international trade. VAT Reporting requirements for International trade can be quite complex and will depend on the nature of your business as well as the nature of your Customer/Supplier (are they individuals or VAT registered entities?). Our recommended approach is that you first determine your requirements and then review them against our VAT UK - Box by Box help document to get clarity on how these transactions should be entered.

We've given the main dashboard a major overhaul that should hopefully present a lot more information in an easy to use manner.

Along with a list of AccountsPortal Updates, there are now 4 charts:

i) Outstanding invoices and credit notes grouped by month.

ii) Outstanding purchase invoice and purchase credit notes grouped by month

iii) A running total of all your bank accounts, displayed over the last 10/30/60/90 days

iv) A summary of your income, expenses and net profit for the financial year to date, grouped by month. You can view this as a cumulative total (i.e. running balance for the year to date), or on a per-month basis.

We have made some subtle design changes to modernise the look of the Customer Invoices, Credit Notes and Statements. We have also enhanced the functionality and control when generating the PDF documents you send to your customers. For each organisation, you can now specifiy which Name and Address details are printed in the Header and Footer sections of the printout.

We've released some new features that should make your accounting life that little bit easier.

Firstly, if you disable a bank account in the chart of accounts, then that bank account will no longer be shown on the dashboard or the bank overview page. In addition, those accounts will no longer be available in the Spend Money or Receive Money transactions. Please note that you cannot disable a bank account if one or more transactions have already been recorded against it.

And, the Bank Overview page now contains a chart showing the balance for each enabled bank account over the last 30 days. You can hover over each date point on the chart to get an exact balance at that point in time.