search.noResults

search.searching

dataCollection.invalidEmail
note.createNoteMessage

search.noResults

search.searching

orderForm.title

orderForm.productCode
orderForm.description
orderForm.quantity
orderForm.itemPrice
orderForm.price
orderForm.totalPrice
orderForm.deliveryDetails.billingAddress
orderForm.deliveryDetails.deliveryAddress
orderForm.noItems
Benjamin Dyer is the CEO of Powered Now. Powered Now aims to take the pain out of admin and paperwork for trade businesses like gas engineers, electricians, builders, and many more. www.powerednow.com


IT


MTD - now the dust has settled


THE start of mandatory reporting involving MTD for VAT came in on 1 April. Benjamin Dyer, CEO of Powered Now, looks at the current state of things in the MTD world.


What is MTD? MTD (Making Tax Digital) is the digital program designed to drag HMRC and us into the 21st Century.


Under this program, every aspect of tax is scheduled to become digital and detailed records of all income and expenses are meant to be kept on computer. But things haven’t been going smoothly.


While we should now be in the midst of a massive MTD program, it has been temporarily cut back to only cover VAT. Don’t be fooled though, even if you don’t charge VAT you will be caught by MTD eventually. All businesses with sales of more than £10k will become subject to MTD and have to report their returns by computer. But this will be by 2021 at the earliest.


What is MTD actually about? The primary aim of MTD is to close the ‘tax


28


gap’, ie collect taxes that the government thinks they are missing. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that once everything is held digitally this will enable HMRC to check for fraud using methods like artificial intelligence.


How is the introduction of MTD for VAT going? The deadline for MTD for VAT means that VAT periods starting from 1 April must have their related return VAT made through MTD. So, if your last VAT period ended on 31 March, the first compulsory MTD VAT return will be on 7 August, 2019.


MTD has been getting off the ground slowly. Tens of thousands of businesses had moved to MTD by 1 April this year, but that still left more than 1m businesses still to go. With the final deadline for a return of 7 October for businesses that had a VAT period end of 28 February, this means a huge number of companies still need to get onto MTD.


If everyone waits until the last moment, we could see more than 330,000 businesses doing their first MTD for VAT return each month in August, September and October. That would be over 10,000 businesses a day, if spread throughout the


month which it won’t be!


If people all delay to the last minute, it’s going to be pandemonium. The argument for adopting now is to avoid the mayhem. That’s even though the late summer mess is likely to be so bad that no-one will be blamed for late submissions.


What are the choices? There is a vast array of over 300 software solutions available for MTD, including one from my company, Powered Now. There is one big choice to make, to either use “bridging software” or implement a permanent solution. Bridging software simply copies data into the MTD portal with minimal changes. Our advice is to implement a permanent solution now. That means that you won’t need to change things again when the exemption allowing bridging software is withdrawn. You will also avoid an even bigger shock when other phases of MTD come in and which won’t allow bridging.


If you are VAT registered and have not yet sorted out your plans for MTD for VAT, I suggest that you do so now. It’s likely to be a lot more frantic the longer you leave it.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36