Yes, Howard. The issue you're experiencing is related to the regional settings of the QuickBooks Online (QBO) account you signed up for.
QBO is designed to align with the accounting and tax regulations of specific countries. Since you signed up for the Isle of Man version, it lacks certain features available in the UK version, particularly those necessary for United Kingdom (UK) tax compliance.
The free trial for the Isle of Man version doesn't include key features for UK users, such as direct connection to HMRC for Making Tax Digital (MTD) and built-in, pre-filled tax settings to facilitate compliance. As a result, the setup prompts you mentioned are specific to the UK version and will not appear in the Isle of Man version.
While the Isle of Man shares some similarities with UK tax regulations, QBO treats these as separate jurisdictions. Consequently, the international version you're using doesn't support the specific functionalities for compliance in the UK.
To address this issue, you may want to consider cancelling your current free trial account and signing up for a new QBO account that is UK-specific. The country settings in your current account can't be changed. However, since you're on a free trial, you can cancel your subscription at no cost.
Once done, you can then visit the Plans and Pricing page to select and purchase a subscription option that is exclusive to the UK version.
It's also worth noting that you'll have to manually transfer any data you entered in the Isle of Man version to your new UK account, as automated data migration between regional versions is not supported.
Once finished, you can now proceed to set up you and use the VAT feature exclusive in UK version of QBO.
Feel free to reply to this post if you need further assistance.
