How to set up financial year, accounting dates and VAT in Accounting Start.
Resolution
Before you start entering transactions. make sure your financial year dates, GDPR retention period and VAT settings are entered correctly.
From More, choose Business Settings, then Accounting Dates & VAT.
Work down the following sections in turn:
This makes sure you can run reports and view transactions that reflect your business year.
Year End Date
- Enter the last day of your new financial year in the Year End Date field.
You can enter this at any time, even after entering transactions - Click Save at the bottom of the page
Change your financial year
Enter last day of your new financial year in the Year End Date field.
You can do this at any time, even after entering transactions.
Once changed, your financial reports will reflect your new dates.
Move to the next financial year
We recommend that you enter all your transactions, print reports and enter a lockdown date.
For details on how to move from one financial year to the next, see Financial year end
Year end lockdown date
Enter a lockdown date if you want to prevent transactions being accidentally entered for a previous financial year.
For example, if your financial year ends on 31 December, enter 31 December as the Year End Lockdown date. New transactions can then only be entered from 1 January onwards.
If you have transactions that need to be entered for your previous year, simply remove the Year End Lockdown date.
Accounts start date
This is the date you want to start entering transactions from. Once set, you can't enter transactions, apart from opening balances, before this date.
We automatically set opening balances for the day before this date.
For example, if the start date is 1 April, your opening balances must have a date of 31 March or earlier.
- From More, choose Business Settings, then Accounting Dates & VAT.
- In the VAT Details section, check the following:
- VAT scheme - Check you have selected the correct scheme
- Submission frequency - Choose how often you submit a VAT Return to the Revenue. This depends on how you registered with the Revenue
- VAT number - Your VAT registration number
Sales to EU customers
This is an optional scheme to help you report and pay all EU VAT through a single return instead of having to register and pay VAT in each country you sell to. Read about EU VAT e-commerce rules.
If you want to use this scheme, choose Use destination VAT for sales to EU consumers.
Your retention period is the length of time you store customer and supplier data (or records) for business or compliance purposes. When the retention period ends, you must remove the data. This reduces the risk of keeping unnecessary, inaccurate, or out of date information.
set a retention period here so you know when to remove information about your contacts.
We never remove information automatically, you must choose to remove personal data from you contact records.
Read more about GDPR - Manage your business data retention period.
Under Business Data Retention Period, complete the following information:
-
- End of Tax Year - select the month that your current tax year ends
- Retention Period - select the number of years you want to retain customer and supplier personal data for
- Reason - Enter any notes applicable to your retention period. For example, Required for VAT records
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