Deadline

The new rate of VAT comes into effect on Monday 1st December 2008. The changes outlined below need to be in place before you generate your invoices for your week ending date after this. So if you end your week on a Saturday you have until Saturday 6th December. If you end your week on Wednesday you have until Wednesday 3rd December. If you print your invoices before your week ending date then obviously you need to make the changes before your print run. It is also important that you only make the changes after your end of week that is before Monday 1st December.

New VAT band

It is very important that you use a separate VAT band for the new rate of 15%. Paragon stores the VAT band used on an invoice not the VAT rate so if you were to change your band from 17.5% to 15% any invoices you reprint will show the wrong VAT.
Paragon currently has four VAT bands, 1 for none vatable products and 2 for 17.5% with 3 and 4 as spares. The two spares were put in place according to HMC guidelines, however since then some of our users may have used these bands for Hampers at 8% and 4%. We have made a quick change to Paragon and released version 2.04a which has additional VAT bands to get around this potential problem.
To set-up your new VAT band, you will need to go into the System Options which can be found on the Tools menu. Then select the Value Adjustments page. Enter 15.00 into your spare band.

Move Products from 17.5% VAT Band to15% VAT Band

In the Product Maintenance screen you must now change the products that are on the 17.5% VAT band to your newly created 15% VAT band.
 To help simplify this process we have added a button in version 2.04a to change all products at once.

When you click the button you will be asked for the current and new VAT Bands in my example this is 2 and 3.

The programme will go through and alter all products automatically after a confirmation screen.

Exiting the Product Modification screen will ask if you want to apply the changes you just made to the Rounds. You may want to postpone doing this step until you have read the Price modification step below.

Price modification

Paragon stores all prices including VAT, this being originally a Doorstep Milk delivery system where most products were none vatable.
At this point you may want to decrease the price of your vatable products. For example if you have a carton of Orange Juice that you were selling for £1.17 you may want to reduce this to £1.15.
Modify prices in the normal way using the Increase facility in the Product Maintenance screen.