This sucks. No 30 day trials available to “test” Excel once a year?
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of course!
Excel standalone: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/excel/cfq7ttc0hr4r?activetab=pivot:overviewtab
Office 2021: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/office-home-business-2021/cfq7ttc0hpn4?activetab=pivot:overviewtab
Excel for home and students, way cheaper but perhaps in breach of the TOS for your application: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/excel-home-and-student/cfq7ttc0hlkr?activetab=pivot:overviewtab
Hope these help, and that you can write off the expenses on your taxes or something. I’m also really hesistant to subscribe to all these SaaS subscriptions for things I rarely use.
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Oh man, that is madness. Let me check what some of my contractor buddies are doing. I know most will have an accountant, but at least one does his own filing.
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What is this? The 90s?
This is madness…
This is my issue. Its literally just for vat. Im only gonna use it once every 3 months.
If it was a total migration to excel i could understand it but my GS spreadsheet is fine for tax and daily filing and my accountant. But to do this one poxy job once a quarter. This.
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Huh I did not think I’d ever sing the Dutch tax service’s praises, but doing VAT is a relatively painless process for me. I tally my books, making sure I have photos of all significant receipts and copies of bills and stuff. Then I plug the numbers into their website. Bit like the self checkout at the supermarket, they trust you to do it right, and have the right to audit you and woe betide the one who’s books don’t tally.
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Ok, I think I understand the reasoning now. Back when I was a contractor, my accountant mentioned “Making Tax Digital” and HMRC wanting people to use MTD compliant software. I thought at the time you had to sign up to using MTD, but it seems HMRC want everyone to do this now.
One of my colleagues who files his own uses Xero and says it’s painless and finds it easier than using Excel.
We use it with the farm business, but I’m lazy so an accountancy does the difficult bit and I use their license as a client.
I have found this: ANNA which states its free to use software, you can use google sheets and they do the bridging to HMRC for you. It’s free, they don’t plan to charge for it. Note: I haven’t done any due diligence on this, so not sure how secure it is.
From their website:
Submit your VAT Return from any Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet. It’s MTD-compliant and it’s completely free.
And
Is it really free?
Yes. You can file your VAT Return through ANNA for free. We have no plans to charge for this service.
As well as filing VAT Returns, ANNA provides plenty of other useful business tools. The majority of them are free. Some, like automated VAT calculation, involve a small fee.
I’m guessing they make their money with the other useful things they can do for you and the VAT filing is their loss leader/hook.
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