Moving to VAT registration for UK Retailer on Square Retail Plus

[BeerGunVio]

Hello guys,

We are just moving to UK VAT registration. We have 500SKU's already created on retail plus where we have tax switched off.

We created a new sales tax at 20% and set retail pricing to include the vat amount- but not applied to all until we are VAT registered- but need to be rady to switch on. So our shop prices to a customer do not go up but include the VAT.

However the Unit cost, there is no mention of how that should then be inputted to reflect correct VAT paid on the unit cost and therefore showing our correct profit analysis.

Currently not being vat registered out unit cost is item cost+vat included as we have to pay VAT.

However once VAT registered,what unit cost do we add? Does Square add vat in its calculations to the unit cost automatically to reflect and offset vat in or vat out?

Also how can we amend VAT for postage, for example royal mail charge vat on some postage options and not on others- how do we make that work?

Lastly, we use Square for inventory and P&L reporting, we have Woocommerce as our web platform. Will Square pass the retail price inc vat correctly across to WooCOmmerce?

Are there any gotcha's - as we keep finding them on inventory management and syncing we need to know now as the VAT man is not at all sympathetic to your software glitches 🙂

Could you confirm.

[tranguyen]

Hi @BeerGunVio, thanks for your post! 

On tracking VAT with unit cost, I had a quick look on my end and this doesn't seem possible at the moment. I've reached out to our Retail team to double-check just in case and see if there are any workarounds available as well.

On tracking VAT with postage fee, can you let me know if the postage fee is setup as an individual item or are you entering it manually when creating an order through the Square for Retail app? If you're entering it manually, there isn't a way to track VAT for it at the moment either.

On syncing tax and item price to WooCommerce, the integration does not support tax-inclusive pricing. You'll need to setup tax rate on Square and make sure it match your WooCommerce tax rate. This will need to be added to the item price, rather than included already. 

[BeerGunVio]

We setup  a test product with tax inclusive pricing and it syncs to woocommerce where we also setup vat inclusive pricing. It appeared to have no issue. So should this not work?

It's crucial we know how best to then configure if you think this does not work?

So if we need to setup all products vat exclusive and state vat is added to the price, what is the cleanest way to change all of 500sku's from our current retail price not including vat and amending them all to price that is the current price less UK VAT.

Can we export all the data and amend the item price thats 20% lower?

If the unit cost does not track vat then how can we use Square to link to accounts software?

Should we enter the unit cost without vat then, so that would likely mean for accounting you have to add all products/items in a vat exclusive price. VAT paid needs to be offset against vat charged on our sales, so clearly you have to deduct unit cost vat from item price vat to meet taxation laws.

Can't believe we are the first retailer setting this up who's online and bricks and mortar?

If we ask you to build a website using your "Online" platform, would that overcome all synchronisation issues, postage and vat?

With regard to postage, we have to integrate with 4 couriers, each have post code algorithms for charging by where you live and then dependant on product quantity it drives different postage charges- this where WooCommerce is essential as Square has no ability that we have been made aware of for complex online postage or do you have APIs into DPD/Royal Mail/APC/PArcelforce?

The Royal mail for example has some charging options that are vat exempt and others that are cost +vat. We can build these in WooCommerce.

[tranguyen]

I've checked with our Partnership and they confirmed that right now, the WooCommerce + Square integration support just tax-exclusive price and tax rates need to be set up on both sites. I'd like to flag this to the team in case something is not working correctly To clarify, when you set up the test item, was the tax enabled and live in Square as well or was it turn off?

You can export the item library, amend the price and then import it to your Items Library. 

Unfortunately it does look like that there isn't a way to track VAT with unit cost at the moment so this is something that will need to be track outside of Square.

There are limitations with the Square Online site in that it does not sync tax settings and categories. This mean you'd need to set up your tax again. There also isn't a way to track VAT paid on postage fee with the Square Online site. 

We do not have any direct integration with couriers like DPD, RoyalMail, etc. at the moment but it is something our team are working to roll out soon. 

[BeerGunVio]

Hello Tra,

Yes we created 20% sales tax, stated item price is inclusive of tax, but switched off apply to all. then created a test product where tax was automatically switched on as a  newly created item.

We switched on Woocommerce vat, added uk vat rule of 20% and chose item price includes vat as we did on square.

We synced with woocommerce, it uploaded the item/product and when we went to Woo basket we could see a line stating vat included within the basket total was x vat value.

So that aspect worked fine. Postage we will sort in Woocommerce as we thought Square was behind on this development.

We had 4 more order product sync gremlins today- well that is what you keep telling us that its a woocommerce plugin issue, though the order pulls through to transactions in Square, but Square history items, randomly misses one bottle or more from the customer order. I.e customer had ordered 6 wines, Square transactions show the right 6 wines to match WooCommerce,the Square  transaction logs show right data of 6 wines synced but the Square items  failed to update on 2 wines, so 4 had right quantity i stock but two didn't.

Worst still today, customer wanted to order more wine but Square lost the quantity and we lost out on selling 5more bottles of wine we did have in stock. 

We are then finding accounting errors galore when we export your data into Xero - your recommend accounting software provider. So we have to resolve these issues fast or we stop paying for Retail Plus and return the hardware purchased for our shop and find an inventory system that is reliable. Our accountants are expensive to be manually re-checking the feed into Xerp for time and analysis

[tranguyen]

Thanks for getting back to me. I can definitely try and flag the WooCommerce issue with our Partnership team and see if they have any further insight. Have you been able to reach out to the WooCommerce support team? If so, would you mind sending me a message with the support ticket number you have with WooCommerce and all the information the WooCommerce team have provided? Our team do need this information so we can investigate further on our end. 

If you are encountering issues with Xero, the best course of action is to create a case with the Xero support team via Xero Central. You can do this from the help icon in your Xero product, or by going directly to Xero’s contact page from any device.

If for some reason they’re not able to help you, reach out to our team with your support ticket number and we’ll see what we can do from our side.

[BeerGunVio]

Why do I always need to goto woocommerce, as we have explained setting up a test product on square it worked, you are stating it shouldn't work, so have you checked with your Square team as you should know best surely?

As a small retailer we haven't the time or expertise to be raising cases every other day only to receive endless technical asks that we then have to secure external paid resource to review. 

We have just paid for extensive square/woocommerce software dev time for sync problems. following the endless asks from you both. Having completed those and both of you were happy; syncing has failed again already. 

If we have the same headache just switching on VAT then I feel we will need to find another inventory/website platform.

We are paying a premium for square retail but the support and help always costs us more developer time just to work through all your asks.

We really hoped square online would of been a huge positive angle to move to and hoped then we would lose all the sync issues. Woocommerce seems to be perfect in its onlinee approach and its own stock control works- its the syncing and integration with Square that are the problem and now the lack of help with Square.

We are not technical people just passionate wine/beer/gin sellers 🙂

We are now even more confused.