The Kashflow-Ebay-Hmrc Complex

[SamW]

To all the Guys and Girls especially those who sell stuff online via paypal and are VAT registered and who use Kashflow please please help.

The Problem : We sell stuff on ebay mainly using paypal to receive payments. We are a UK based VAT registered company. We recently signed up to use the Kashflow online accountancy website/service thinking that it would end (at least some of) our eternal suffering when it comes to producing the deadly mindnumbingly dull dreaded and also boring VAT return for our dear masters at HMRC. Unfortunatly that hasnt proved to be the case as Kashflow doesnt seem able to talk to Paypal in the way that its advertised.

We happily sell goods to anywhere, in the UK, the rest of Europe and outside of Europe.

Obviously the goods we sell via paypal to people in the UK/EU we have to collect VAT on and those people who live outside the EU we dont.

So you would think that Kashflow would be able to identify which country our buyers were in and then based on that decide whether or we shoud be liable for collecting VAT or not. Whether Kashflow supplies the list of VAT/non-VAT countries or whether we do isnt important. Whats important is that this "should" just be an automated process.

We should just able to download all the sales from Paypal in a csv file and then upload it to Kashflow, press the button and then wham kashflow can decide where we need to pay vat or not. But it doesnt work!

Is there anyone out there who is using Kashflow and Paypal who is VAT registered who has any experiance of this? Id be happy to donate £30 via paypal to the charity of your choice if you can help us acheive this feat.

I have been in touch with Kashflow tech support about this several times but unfortunatly have been unable to get anything from anyone that really helps. All it ended up being was please contact paypal, so hours on the phone to paypal, they said contact ebay, hours on the phone to ebay, back to paypal, back to kashflow. etc etc.

Everyones passing the buck no ones to blame.

We are importing the information into kashflow via a CSV file downloaded from paypal.

At the moment whether the customer is in Japan, Australia, or Barnsley then Kashflow is still marking them all as being liable for the 20% VAT.

Is it possible for kashflow to apply 20% VAT if the customers are in the
EU and 0% if not based on the country field in the address in the CSV file.

Surely this is somehow possible?

Thankyou all for reading this far

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

Is it possible for kashflow to apply 20% VAT if the customers are in the
EU and 0% if not based on the country field in the address in the CSV file.

What do Kashflow say when asked the above?

It sounds a little odd that they cant resolve this basic matter for you.

I am not a Kashflow user but when matters are raised on here they do very often respond and sort them out so hopefully someone will be along to help.

 

[Tom McClelland]

Presumably in a mass market internet business you aren't setting up every client as a customer in KashFlow. Based on that assumption it is hard to see this as a KashFlow issue since Kashflow has no information *of its own* upon which to base the VAT status of any particular sale. KashFlow only knows the information given to it in the Paypal data stream.

When you make the sale, do you charge different amounts according to the VAT status of the client, or do you charge a flat rate and then absorb 1/6 yourself for UK sales? And therefore the issue is how to identify the UK sales. Paypal can be set up to add 20% VAT on top of net prices for UK sales, but I haven't found the feature to be 100% reliable. In particular we found that in a significant percentage of UK sales Paypal wouldn't add on the 20% for reasons that couldn't be established. Because 99.9% of our clients are UK based we ended up adding the 20% ourselves in the payment request that we pass to Paypal and ignoring Paypal's own ability to do that.

 

[miss_rhi]

Hi Sam,

Really sorry to hear about the trouble you've been experiencing with this. I'm going to private message you on here as I'd like to ask for your username on KashFlow so we can look at what went wrong with support.

In regards to your Paypal problem; You said you're using CSV exports from PayPal - Have you tried our PayPal importer? We do take care of this automatically using our PayPal importer. No need to export the CSV and import it then!

Rhi

 

[elaine@cheapaccounting]

Hi Sam,

Really sorry to hear about the trouble you've been experiencing with this. I'm going to private message you on here as I'd like to ask for your username on KashFlow so we can look at what went wrong with support.

In regards to your Paypal problem; You said you're using CSV exports from PayPal - Have you tried our PayPal importer? We do take care of this automatically using our PayPal importer. No need to export the CSV and import it then!

Rhi

Hi - just for our info, are you from Kash Flow. Hope you don't mind me checking as you are asking for log on details and only have 2 posts here

 

[miss_rhi]

Hi - just for our info, are you from Kash Flow. Hope you don't mind me checking as you are asking for log on details and only have 2 posts here

Hi Elaine - Yes I am from KashFlow. Sorry - completely forgot to put that in my post.

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

I had a feeling someone from Kashflow would be along pretty quick

 

[number42]

I've just tested Kashflow out setting it up to treat each customer individually and it does correctly record the appropriate rate of VAT per county atleast on our Paypal sales,

I can see all Uk ones have incorporated 20% into them while Australia/USA/China ones all have 0-rated incorporated into them

I think as above you have set kashflow up to treat all sales as one customer rather than a new account for each new sale which is why your vat report is incorrect

Edit: Just a thought, you havent setup paypal to account for VAT have you? This may throw it out

 

[SamW]

Hi Sam,

In regards to your Paypal problem; You said you're using CSV exports from PayPal - Have you tried our PayPal importer? We do take care of this automatically using our PayPal importer. No need to export the CSV and import it then!

Rhi

Good point and yes we are using Kashflows Paypal integration NOT a CSV anymore as originally stated but problem remains

 

[Tom McClelland]

Good point and yes we are using Kashflows Paypal integration NOT a CSV anymore as originally stated but problem remains

Do you set up each client individually in KashFlow?

 

[SamW]

Presumably in a mass market internet business you aren't setting up every client as a customer in KashFlow. Based on that assumption it is hard to see this as a KashFlow issue since Kashflow has no information *of its own* upon which to base the VAT status of any particular sale. KashFlow only knows the information given to it in the Paypal data stream.

Thats not correct - Kashflow is making a record for each individual customer, Kashflow has each customers individual address and country Should be able to be determined by it - yet so far we cant get it to.


We charge the same amount for EU and NON-EU based customers but only need to collect the VAT for the EU ones of course.

 

[SamW]

I've just tested Kashflow out setting it up to treat each customer individually and it does correctly record the appropriate rate of VAT per county atleast on our Paypal sales,

I can see all Uk ones have incorporated 20% into them while Australia/USA/China ones all have 0-rated incorporated into them

I think as above you have set kashflow up to treat all sales as one customer rather than a new account for each new sale which is why your vat report is incorrect

Edit: Just a thought, you havent setup paypal to account for VAT have you? This may throw it out

Thanks alot for the response, its not correct that our kashflow is set up to treat all sales as one customer - each customer has there own sales record and there own listing as a customer in the customer section in Kashflow.

With regards to Paypal setup - we have tried to but havent been able to suceed using the backend of paypal to automatically account for the VAT.

I have spent countless hours in contact with both ebay and paypal and in kashflow. Everyone just seems to pass the buck. Although in fairness to Kashflows customer support it wasnt so much that they said it wasnt possible but simply that I had spent so many hours on the problem without a solution it was hard to summon the will to carry on. Not as hard as doing a VAT return manually though which was the reason we went with Kashflow in the first place.

The only and what should be simplest way in order to solve this as far as I can see is for kashflow to apply VAT for us based on the country location of the customer which it can easily determine from the information it gets from paypal.

Seeings as your setup in Kashflow is working do you know where the VAT amount in your sales is coming from? Is it coming from your hosted ecommerce software/ebay or is it setup in your paypal based on the customer location or is it simply determined in Kashflow somehow?

Thanks everyone for their replies so far much appreciated

 

[funkykitsch]

I saw the title of this and instantly thought of the TV programme The Big Bang Theory - it sounds like it could be a title for an episode

 

[SamW]

Do you set up each client individually in KashFlow?

No there are too many clients for us to set them up manually

 

[Tom McClelland]

Like you I've failed in the past to get Paypal to automatically handle VAT on sales. And that is just in our simple scenario where all of our clients are UK based.

Does the Paypal stream include the VAT number of EU customers? You'd need this for correct treatment of EU sales, (things like Intrastat and EC sales list require this if memory serves, and I think it determines whether or not your invoice to the customer should include the reverse charge notification).

 

[number42]

Hi, there was an option when setting up the VAT settings in Kashflow to allow it to automatically calculate the vat on each total sales value based on location and incorporate it within the total sale value.

If you enable this and start syncing to your PayPal account it should work


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[SamW]

Does the Paypal stream include the VAT number of EU customers? You'd need this for correct treatment of EU sales, (things like Intrastat and EC sales list require this if memory serves, and I think it determines whether or not your invoice to the customer should include the reverse charge notification).

No but fortunatly this isnt too much of an issue for us any customers we have that are VAT registered in another EU state we tend to get payment wired via bank transfer rather than paypal....so far

 

[SamW]

Hi, there was an option when setting up the VAT settings in Kashflow to allow it to automatically calculate the vat on each total sales value based on location and incorporate it within the total sale value.

If you enable this and start syncing to your PayPal account it should work


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You're right - ive done some test downloads in Kashflow and this does now seem to work.

Previously we had either all the sales at 0% VAT with one setting or all the sales at 20% with another regardless of location.

This function is verifably working well in Kashflow.

Unfortunatly I have now stumbled upon another problem - I now need to delete all the sales records for the last year that have come in via paypal so I can have kashflow re-download them again but apply the correct VAT rates to them all ( 0% and 20% respectively depending if out or inside the EU).

If I go into the SALES section inside Kashflow then I get a list of all the invoices - problem is there appears to be no way that I can differentiate between invoices that have been generated by Paypal and invoices that I have manually created myself. This doesnt seem that logicial to me but perhaps there is some way to do this in Kashflow which I am missing?

 

[SamW]

Just in case anyone stumbles across this - some weeks after the original post was made we are still suffering Big problems using Kashflow and there importer system.

I cant begin to explain to you how many hours we have spent trying to fix it. We have had over 30 back and forth emails with Kashflow and whilst the fact that they respond in a timely manner including at weekends is great unfortunatly the quality of the actual technical assistance hasnt been up to scratch.

In short kashflow is supposed to download all the transactions from paypal and integrate them into its own database, in reality its broken. Its importer is just not working properly and its really caused us so many headaches and its still on going now.

Kashflow asked us to download a CSV from paypal with all the transactions and email it to them so they could "cross check everything."

In reality after they had done this and our accounts Still after hours and weeks still didnt balance we went through the withdrawals (from paypal to bank) and found that for some reason kashflow importer had double up on some of them!

So the whole point of using kashflow was to make our life easier, it has made it immeasurably more complicated. They are still emailing back and forth - if the problem is ever resolved I will post it here but im beginning to doubt its possible without us physically going through every single transaction manually - in which case what was the point of using kashflow.

Something is clearly broken inside the kashflow system and they way its interacting with paypal.

 

[Tom McClelland]

In short kashflow is supposed to download all the transactions from paypal and integrate them into its own database, in reality its broken. Its importer is just not working properly and its really caused us so many headaches and its still on going now.

As a bald statement on its own that sounds a little unlikely. Many KashFlow users integrate with Paypal and if there were *general* problems with the importer there would be a large number of those users up in arms on UKBF and elsewhere.

I stand ready to be corrected if other KF users step forward with similar problems. There are plenty of KF users here to correct me if I'm wrong.

I wonder, could the issues be related to attempts to alter the historic data to solve your VAT treatment problems reported up-thread, rather than being related to general normal use of the importer? Just a possibility that occurs to me.

I'm sorry that you're having difficulties and I hope KF manages to resolve them soon to your satisfaction. Duane Jackson is a member here but he is also a moderator so his ability to reply online to a complaint may be somewhat constrained by his dual role here.

 

[DuaneJackson]

Something is clearly broken inside the kashflow system and they way its interacting with paypal.

Actually, the problem is with inconsistencies in the data we get from PayPal. They (PayPal) are working on it, but as you can imagine - big companies move slowly.

The reason you were asked for the CSV was so we could demonstrate to PayPal the inconsistencies between that and the data from their API.

I know this doesn't help you and I know how frustrating this is. But I just wanted to clarify that this isn't a problem in our system and the speed of resolving it is unfortunately out of our hands.

 

[SamW]

As a bald statement on its own that sounds a little unlikely. Many KashFlow users integrate with Paypal and if there were *general* problems with the importer there would be a large number of those users up in arms on UKBF and elsewhere.

I stand ready to be corrected if other KF users step forward with similar problems. There are plenty of KF users here to correct me if I'm wrong.

Well some of the withdrawals from paypal-to-bank account have been missed out - no record of them in the importer.

Some have been doubled.

The ones that are missing we have noticed are when the withdrawals were using the 5 GBP quick withdrawal option (that no longer exists) not the normal one.

Of the ones that have been doubled we cannot work out any pattern but I guess each transaction would have a unique transaction ID so you would imagine that kashflow should be able to cross check these in the background to make sure things werent counted twice. Obviously that depends on what the data looks like that comes out of paypal to kashflow which Im not sure about.

I wonder, could the issues be related to attempts to alter the historic data to solve your VAT treatment problems reported up-thread, rather than being related to general normal use of the importer? Just a possibility that occurs to me.

We have had to draw a line under last years accounts as we just cant spend any more time on it so we are now just trying to get the accounts working for this financial year instead.

Its true that we are importing alot of data at one time - perhaps regular use of the importer in shorter bursts is less problematic, im not convinced its going to be 100% accurate though.

No doubt a large portion of the blame is with the original data coming from paypals system into kashlow, problem is that doenst help anyone like our small company who pretty much only sell online trying to use kashflow for its accounting.

 

[SamW]

Actually, the problem is with inconsistencies in the data we get from PayPal. They (PayPal) are working on it, but as you can imagine - big companies move slowly.

The reason you were asked for the CSV was so we could demonstrate to PayPal the inconsistencies between that and the data from their API.

I know this doesn't help you and I know how frustrating this is. But I just wanted to clarify that this isn't a problem in our system and the speed of resolving it is unfortunately out of our hands.

Surely this isnt an isolated case though?

If it is an isolated case then there must be something peculiar about our situation. For example that we had to get kashflow to download a big chunk of data from the past in one time perhaps.

 

[SamW]

just in case anyone cares this is still going, still unable to use kashflow to produce our vat reports using data from paypal.

 

[SamW]

well its now nearly March... another tax year nearly over and Kashflow still does not operate as advertised with our paypal account.

Is it working ok with VAT reporting for anyone else that sells in and outside of Europe?

 

[Richie N]

As Duane said it might actually be a problem with the reporting being produced from Paypal.

 

[SamW]

As Duane said it might actually be a problem with the reporting being produced from Paypal.

Then why is it advertised as a product that will work with Paypal if it doesn't - regardless of whose fault it might be.

 

[Richie N]

Maybe you are best contacting Kashflow direct rather than posting it on here...

I don't know of any other users that have had issues with this.

 

[Alan]

I read this thread with interest, as I am currently trying out Kashflow, specifically because of its paypal integration. I haven't go to the stage where I'm ready to start processing paypal data. So I'll keep a close eye on how it goes.

 

[DuaneJackson]

The data integrity (random transactions missing) with PayPal API is now fixed as of a few weeks ago - it took us a long time to get them to accept it was an issue their end and then to get a fix deployed - but it is now done.

There are thousands of people using the PayPal importer with no problems at all.

Sam, I'm not sure what your specific problem is at the moment, do let me know if there is a recent support ticket number I can look at.

Taking of my KashFlow Founder hat for a minute and putting on my fellow business owner hat - why are you still using the product if it doesn't do what you want it to do?