In order to submit my quarterly VAT return I have used Breww to collate invoices for a quarterly period. I don’t find this user friendly at all. I have handed over reporting to a colleague and he has been unable to get this information out of the sales figures. First thing, the ‘reporting’ section is split into two pages, which do I use? and the confusion continues with ‘metrics’, an offer to ‘save a template’, ‘line graphs’ etc none of which are in simple layman’s terms. Can we have a ‘VAT template’ ready made, sat there waiting for us to input start and end dates and hey presto! all the invoices for that period appear with the totals? My previous attempts have produced sum totals of money but I have had to take these on face value, no way of checking if the total actually IS the total. If a VAT template isn’t the answer then simple plain instructions would be useful. I can’t believe this is not a basic part of the Breww system as we all have to submit a return 3 times a year?
I’m sorry that you’ve found this confusing!
The custom reports in Breww are split into two, the Aggregate reports and the Raw data reports. The raw data reports are exactly that, just a list of the data entries based on the configuration of the report. The aggregate reports are a way of grouping figures together to give you totals/graphs. For example, take all of your order lines within a period, the raw data explorer would allow you to view/export a long list of the order lines with their data, such as product name, value, vat etc. The aggregate report will allow you to view the data but grouped by a certain ‘metric’, such as the product or customer, which would allow you to view/plot the total value of that product ordered by each customer in the time period, for example.
VAT amount isn’t a metric in the aggregate data reports, so you wouldn’t be able to use that to provide a total amount of VAT paid within a certain date. To do this, I’d recommend using the “All sales” report in the “Pre-built Sales reports” section. Here, you can enter the date period and view the total VAT paid on each order in this period, as well as a total amount of VAT for all the orders at the bottom. You can also export this Excel if needed.
Does this solve it for you? Or is there further filtering you need to calculate the total amount of VAT paid for the period?
In the UK, you typically have to submit a VAT return 4 times each year. Virtually all VAT-registered businesses in the UK are required by law to submit their returns via “functional compatible software”.
Breww isn’t suitable for submitting your VAT returns, and we don’t have plans at this stage to make it such; I’m sorry.
Breww can integrate with many platforms (such as Xero, Quickbooks, Sage, etc) that are “functional compatible software”. If you integrate Breww with suitable accounting software, Breww will sync everything needed to this software automatically, and you can submit your VAT return through your accounting software.
If you’ve not integrated Breww with your accounting software, you really should do that, to be honest. You legally need to have the accounting software in place, so we’d suggest you integrate the two rather than use Breww (in isolation) to produce your VAT return. This will save you (and your accountant) lots of time.
If integrating Breww with your accounting software isn’t something you want to do, please let us know why, and we can help you to find a solution.
At this stage, this is really a help thread and not a feature request, so I’ve moved it to that section of our community. If this does become a viable feature request, I’ll happily move it back. Thank you.