In the new Making Tax Digital configuration Section (available under your Lettings Configuration heading), you can configure which accounting software you use for your office/business accounting and set some parameters for producing your VAT Export MTD.
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Use the financial Accounting software drop-down to select which of the supported accounting packages you are using. Select 'other' if none of the above apply. Selecting other will allow you to export the VAT Export report that you see onscreen into a CSV. It won't then be formatted for a specific software.
You can then enter the following information if you so require:
1: An invoice/credit note prefix so that if in the instance your office/business accounting software requires you to have unique invoice numbers, and you have a separate similar numbering sequence running for invoices raised out of the other software, you will still be able to import your invoices from the client account.
2: You can opt to run your VAT export for invoices on an item by item level or at nominal level depending on preference. This will be ticked by default so remember to untick if you do not wish to run your export by summary. If you chose to have your report run by summary, fields 3 and 4 below are compulsory as you are only able to run a summary report with your invoices grouped.Â
3: If you don't have currently/wish to have each individual landlord, tenant and contractor recorded as a separate customer in your office/business accounting software, you can enter a reference in here that will then be used in the export as the customer name for all your sales invoices so that all invoices originating from the client account will be grouped together under one customer. For Sage users, this should be the A/C reference of the customer. This field is limited to 8 characters as per Sage parameters. For Xero this should be the Contact Name and for QB the Customer Display Name and the field is limited to 21 characters for both.Â
4: Same as above but for your uplifted purchase invoices.
You can leave any of the above fields blank/unticked if you do not wish to use these options before you save.
For any multi branch businesses, if you will be running separate exports per branch, you must ensure you complete this configuration for any branch you will be running the export from.
The Online Valuation Tool is a new feature to Expert Agent on your EA Website. It integrates seamlessly with your website and pulls data into your Expert Agent. Â
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Once it has been enabled from our side you will receive the new item in your Configuration Options (for Super Users only) - Tools -> Configuration -> Property Configuration -> Online Valuation Tool. Â
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 Once there you will see this screen:Â
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This is for old style Expert Agent websites. Â
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Please contact your Account Manager if you are unsure what style you have. Â This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.Â
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The Data Retention section provides you with the ability to configure data retention times on a per branch level. Each branch within Expert Agent will be able to set this and only delete data from their own branch. If you are Data Sharing, just because you can see other branches data, doesn't mean you can delete it. Â
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Under Data Retention you have two options:Â
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1. You can stop EA from deleting data, even if you ask for it to be deleted, with associated financial transactions for anything from 1 to 7 years. There is also an option to allow deletions regardless. Â
2. You can prevent bulk deletion of Vendors who have sold a property through Expert Agent in the last 5 years. Â
3. From a Head Office you can apply these settings to all Sub Branches. Please be aware that the sub branches will still get the option to overwrite that if they can access Configuration. Â
4. Remember to press Save. Â
You are able to use this function to lock any records with a transaction date prior to a certain date.
For example if you have just completed your reports for the last financial year you may wish to put the last date in this box to prohibit any transactions during that financial period being cancelled. Any transactions prior to this date will not appear in the Cancel Transactions area.Â
Once you have entered a date and saved the change, you are unable to change the date to a previous one. Â For example with the above date saved you would be unable to change the date to 31 March 2015. You are however able to move the date forward as necessary.
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