That’s a very interesting point! I hadn’t heard about the tax change yet and I imagine there are quite a few heads getting scratched about now. Good time to be a consultant me thinks!

[...] Charging VAT? Foolish to say the least [...]

See, I don’t think it’s that much of a problem to be honest, not for highstreet retail anyway (there’s a whole VAT issue for small business as it is)

If you think about it, most POS systems and back office have lots of flexibility on pricing, ad-hoc offers are done all the time, discounts are applied every day, and the systems need flexibility to do those. Sure the 17.5% may be hard coded, but you could just leave that there, and apply a constant reduction factor over every transaction and log it on the bill.

As for pricing ,sure it’ll piss off Argos and the catalogue shops, but anywhere else, replacing the tickets, while a ball ache, is trivial and something that goes on all the time. When I worked in Asda, we could have the entire store replaced in less than a day, even overnight. Given that most food goods are exempt, you may need to replace what? 25% of tickets in your average supermarket.. They probably do that every day.

The whole thing sucks for many reasons, but change in prices isn’t one. And you don’t hear retailers whining if they had to put *up* the cost of goods by 2.5%…

>BenB

“apply a constant reduction factor over every transaction and log it on the bill”

DIRTY HACK! DIRTY HACK!

One that would work mind you, but I bet it would cause chaos else where, eg. VAT returns, compound discounts, credit schemes, etc etc.

I’m a consultant! There’s no such thing as a dirty hack, it’s an expedient interim solution. And if they want the thing implementing in a week, it’s bloody well more than they deserve.

On the returns basis it completely depends on how they caclulate their VAT to be honest, on summed totals or based on a per-transaction basis. But the best way would be to not change the VAT rate, add on a 2.19% reduction to the overall price, do your VAT return at 17.5% and then alter that when you submit to the tax man. Sure you have to reprint your POS, but means you can avoid hacking the back office systems too much, and plonk the pain onto accounting.

Anyway, that’ll focus a few minds, to make sure that adjustment factors are indeed user changable true global variables..

That said, if I were a retailer, I’d tell them to stuff it, and keep the difference for myself, it’s not like anyone would notice.

[...] Charging VAT? Foolish to say the least [...]

You’re bang on about the huge fuss it caused.

Think about:
– Invoices raised two weeks in advance – are they wrong? (answer: no, but you’d be surprised about the number of accountants who think the answer is yes)
– Not everything product has VAT associated with it – e.g. food doesn’t (except in a restaurant)
– A strange phenomenon called Annual VAT invoices

Plus they only had a week to sort things out.

VAT is always calculated on a transaction basis (you can only claim back VAT you have a valid invoice for, and only for the amount it says on the invoice), so unfortunately it’s not just a matter of multiplying by a fixed factor (plus there is a 5% rating, and two different types of 0% rating, so VAT is not applied at one constant rate to everything)

It’s also not even a 2.5p in the pound reduction, it’s a 2.5p in the £1.175 reduction – a measly 2.1%.

My theory – it’s there to try and help stop the retailers from going bust. An extra 2.1% makes bugger all difference to the customer, but might stop a retailer on the brink from falling off the edge.

Either that or it’s to help the consultants, who need to be brought in to give advice on how exactly the VAT legislation works (or to fix the crappy software they wrote)

[...] Charging VAT? Foolish to say the least (coldclimate.co.uk) [...]