VAT return and payment made outwith Quickbooks

[JC95]

Hello,

I am a brand new Quickbooks Online Essentials customer in the UK (joined yesterday). We have joined to get ready for the new MTD legislation.

We are a VAT registered company and our return periods are Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep and Oct-Dec.

Our financial year runs from the 1st of January to the 31st of December. I have imported our bank transactions from the 1st of Jan 2019 to present day. I assumed this would be the easiest way to transition between our old methods by starting Quickbooks on the first day of our financial year.

One of the transactions imported from our bank is a payment for our VAT return running from October 2018 to December 2018.

Please note that this return was filled using HMRCs online portal. NOT Quickbooks. We then made the payment through our online banking.

My question is, how should this be categorized? Is this classed as an expense? Is this classed as a transfer? If it is an expense, then what category should it be applied to? If it is a transfer, then what account should it be applied to? Is it none of these things and should I be doing something completely different? 

I'm a tad confused by the terminology and I don't want to start off our new Quickbooks file by doing something wrong! 

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[TaliaI]

Hello JC95,

Welcome to the Community - thank you for your question!

We would first like to make it clear that we are not accountant trained, and so therefore suggest you always double check any advice we give you in terms of which account to use etc. with a trained accountant.

We would usually suggest that you create an expense account for VAT and post the VAT payment to this account as a one off. From then on, you will be able to record your VAT payments through the Taxes tab (click on the drop down arrow next to view return and select record payment) for the VAT returns you submit through QuickBooks.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Thank you,

Talia