I would like to help in providing a VAT return report for Ireland, which is similar to the UK VAT return
How do I go about helping to do this?
There are two VAT returns in Ireland
A VAT3 return which is a return of VAT collected and paid with a balance to be paid or refunded. This is submitted every two months usually, although an annual return is available to smaller businesses
RTD return which is a Return of Trading Details which is submitted annually and which details total sales and purchases by VAT rate
with Report Transformations under Settings.
looks like we have to create a script that would access the various data necessary.
the second link i provided above will help you make it available for all users.
Even i would like to help provide local customized reports. but I am not sure if we have to write the script ourselves or @lubos will help with it based on the requirements we provide from official sources.
I would be surprised if that was a significant barrier to publishing a good localisation. As uploading it to https://www.manager.io/get-involved/countries just need someone with trust level two do do it.
Quite possibly during beta testing of a localisation it maybe uploaded to a thread on the forum first and only after a few people have tested it will it be uploaded to the main web site. Given that approach only those with final QA authority would need trust level two privileges.
What is more likely to be the barrier is users with the resources to produce the report transformations. Which requires Liquid programming skills, local accounting knowledge, the time and motivation.
Technically I’m less sure the variable naming / scoping program tools are in place to enable generation of localisation using recognised labels rather than hexadecimal references.
Having looked into this, I lost the will to continue - not because of the programming aspect which is easily doable but because of the complexity required to fill the Irish Return of Trading Details which requires your net sales and net purchases to be broken down into a table with
the rows being the tax rates, if which there are 8 types - Exempt, 0% Export EU, 0% Other, Flat rate 5.4%, Livestock Rate 4.8%, 2nd Reduced rate 9%, Reduced Rate 13.5% and Std Rate 23%
The four columns of the table are
Sales of Goods & Services, EU acquisitions, Purchases for resale, Other Purchases
So, in theory, you would need to classify all your purchases by one or more of the three types so I reckon you would need 8 x 4 = 32 different VAT Tax Codes to cater for all eventualities!
The business I look after now gets by with 3 rates, so I think I’ll put this idea aside for now - sorry
Or 8 Vat codes and one purchase type custom field / drop down list with 4 values.
To be fair I have no dealing with Irish tax returns so I don’t really know how practical this is.
Edit:
Actually Australia also uses duplicate tax codes at the same rate to segregate different purchase types.
However are all of the current Manager VAT rates really meaningful for all of the purchase groups or has most of the segregation already been done? To my naive eye there appears to be some overlap between the VAT rate descriptions and the VAT type descriptions.
I have created a custom tax code of 23% Resale to assist in my annual report. Otherwise, I would have to analyse my purchases to split out those for resale, and other
The real problem is that you are expected to report your purchases, net of VAT, broken into Purchases for Resale and Other Purchases. You also need to report on your purchases from other EU countries.
In the EU, suppliers do not charge VAT on the sale of goods to registered VAT customers in other EU countries but the customer has to report the purchases of such goods and VAT is charged on them in the receiving country and then recovered by the customer - so it is just a reporting item as one sets off the other.
I did copy those and looked into using them as a base - all very doable.
The Irish Revenue service have two returns a periodic VAT 3 return VAT 3
which is relatively straight forward as long as you distinguish your intra-EU purchases and sales from the rest of your purchases and sales - so 23% std and 23% EU, 13.5% reduced and 13.5% reduced EU, etc rates required
The annual Return of Trading Details return RTD
is far more complicated and requires you to distinguish purchases of stock for resale and other purchases separately
The RTD appears to imply Ireland tax codes should be something like
VAT 23%
VAT 23% EU
VAT 23% Non-EU
VAT 23% Resale/stock
VAT 13.5%
VAT 13.5% EU
VAT 13.5% Non-EU
VAT 13.5% Resale/stock
VAT 9%
VAT 9% EU
VAT 9% Non-EU
VAT 9% Resale/stock
VAT 4.8%
VAT 4.8% EU
VAT 4.8% Non-EU
VAT 4.8% Resale/stock
VAT 0%
VAT 0% EU
VAT 0% Non-EU
VAT 0% Resale/stock
VAT Exempt
Or have I miss interpreted the requirements.
(Names could probably be better to keep them short & clearly indicate use)
The RDT mentions the VAT rate changing. How often does that happen in practice, or the ask the question in another way, are users in Ireland likely often need to disable old VAT rates?
The RTD only has 4 columns.
The above schema I think is very similar to what is used in the Netherlands (other than they have a 100% VAT code).
So something similar probably should work, but I’m not skilled in Irish VAT taxation law.
Ideally when the end user is entering data into Manager / coding transactions, the process is no more complex than it needs to be to generate to government required information. Selecting from one drop down list of VAT codes suitably sorted & labeled, is probably as simple as it can be given the data collection requirements. The only further improvement I can think of is to show a subset depending on context. End user ready access to longer descriptions of the codes applicability may also help.
