As part of the "Making Tax Digital" initiative HMRC has changed the way businesses used to submit their VAT returns. This now must be done only by digital means without any manual entry or copy-paste involved.

This has an unfortunate effect on anyone maintaining their books on spreadsheet (and / or not using the variety of commercial systems) in that they will be unable to submit their VAT returns until they use a bridging software or a commercial offering.

On principle, I don't think one should be forced to pay money to submit their tax returns and in practice, I don't want to evaluate a load of different services which may or may not be safe to use. It was actually easier and safer to write my own solution, building on the work done by another developer - more power to OpenSource :).

I had to do this in my free time but the solution is now HMRC approved and fully functional. It is open-source, available free of cost for anyone to use from my hosting or can be self-hosted.

The tool is available here --> https://standard-vat-return.herokuapp.com

Hope this will help some.

#opensourcesoftware #MTD