Before you start entering transactions. make sure you've entered your financial year dates, GDPR retention period and VAT settings correctly:
From Settings, choose Business settings, then Accounting dates and VAT.
This makes sure you can run reports and view transactions that reflect your business year.
You can enter this at any time, even after entering transactions
Enter the last day of your new financial year in the Year End Date field.
You can do this at any time, even after entering transactions.
Once changed, your financial reports will reflect your new dates.
We recommend that you enter all your transactions, print reports and enter a lockdown date.
For details on how to move from one financial year to the next, see Financial year end
Enter a lockdown date if you want to prevent transactions being entered accidentally for a previous financial year.
For example, if your financial year ends on 31 December, enter 31 December as the Year End Lockdown date. You can then only enter new transactions from 1 January onwards.
If you have transactions to enter for your previous year, remove the Year End Lockdown date.
This is the date you want to start entering transactions from. Once set, you can't enter transactions, apart from opening balances, before this date.
We automatically set opening balances for the day before this date.
For example, if the start date is 1 April, your opening balances must have a date of 31 March or earlier.
From Settings, choose Business settings, then Accounting dates and VAT.
In the VAT Details section, check or enter the following:
To submit VAT Returns for Making Tax Digital, you must authorise Sage Accounting to submit your VAT Returns.
You need your Government Gateway credentials to sign in to the Gateway as part of this process
From Settings, choose Business settings, then Accounting dates and VAT.
From the Making Tax Digital section, select Authenticate.
Select I have signed up to MTD and have received confirmation from HMRC, then select Authenticate. This takes you to the Gov.uk website.
Select Continue when prompted, and sign in with your Government Gateway credentials.
If you’re a VAT agent, enter your agent services account ID and password.
When prompted, select Grant authority. You’re returned to Sage Accounting. When you see a confirmation message at the bottom of the page, that's it, you're done.
Read about setting up for Making Tax Digital
This is an optional scheme to help you report and pay all EU VAT through a single return instead of having to register and pay VAT in each country you sell to. Read about EU VAT e-commerce rules
If you want to use this scheme, choose:
Use destination VAT for sales to EU consumers
If you import goods from outside the UK, you can use Postponed Accounting.
With postponed accounting, you can declare and recover import VAT in the same VAT Return. This is instead of paying import VAT on or soon after goods arrive and claiming it on your next VAT Return.
The VAT is recorded as both a sale and purchase on your VAT Return, effectively cancelling each other out.
If you want to use postponed accounting for all you imports, you choose to set this be default. Choose
Use postponed accounting to deal with import VAT
Read about postponed accounting
Your retention period is the length of time you store customer and supplier data (or records) for business or compliance purposes. When the retention period ends, you must remove the data. This reduces the risk of keeping unnecessary, inaccurate, or out-of-date information.
set a retention period here so you know when to remove information about your contacts.
We never remove information automatically. Choose to remove personal data from your contact records.
Read more about GDPR - Manage your business data retention period