Changing VAT rates

[Foyowa]

I know this is probably easy but I can't seem to find how to do the following.

Due to the fact that the government has changed VAT on many sports nutrition products from Zero rated to 20% VATable I want to change the Zero-Rated VAT rate to 20%. I know I can just change the Tax Treatment in the product to VAT but I have many hundreds of products that I need to change at a stroke to 20% VAT until I get round to changing the Tax treatment on each product.

[Mike Hughes]

VAT settings are in Business settings> Tax so if you can set it anywhere it will be in there.

Mike

[Foyowa]

That's not what I am on about. I want to be able to change the Zero-Rated to 20% at one stroke.

[Mike Hughes]

Seems to me it's exactly what you're on about but maybe you didn't understand my answer. If you can't set the zero rated VAT rate on the VAT settings page then the chances are you're looking at a database hack to change the zero rate from 0 to something else, if it's possible at all.

I suspect you'd be better off seeing if someone can help you with an access update query to change your Exempt products to standard VAT.

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

You may be able to do this by altering the database. Backup first!
Close Actinic/SD. Open ActinicCatalog.mdb in Access and look in the Product table at the sTax1OpaqueData column. Look at what a 20% item uses and a Zero rated one. On my demo site it's 301=2000=0= and 0=0=0= respectively. If I copy the first into the latter, that rate for a Zero Rated product changes to VAT when Actinic/SD is restarted.

Another way of doing this would be to Export the catalog and import into Excel. Then tinker similarly in Excel (it's column Z in my test export) and re-import the changed data.

I've only tried this on simple products with no price dependent Permutations, Components, etc. Test carefully and use at own risk.

[Duncan Rounding]

Just a note. Offhand I can't remember if the VAT rate of the products is recorded in the orderline in v11, I don't think it was in earlier versions. Some time ago when VAT changed from 17.5% to 20% it caused some reports to be inaccurate (ie the new VAT rate updated the old figures). There is a number of forum threads relating to this and a database query to run to freeze the VAT on the older orders. It might be worth looking at that also.

[NormanRouxel]

And, of course, expect all your prices to increase on the items you moved from 0 VAT to 20%. The default way in SD is for the prices to be held internally at tax-exclusive values. So changing a product to be Taxable will increase the price the customer pays.

[Mike Hughes]

If you want to edit the database, the Table TaxBands has the rates for all the tax bands. Changing the dBandRate for the Zero-Rated record to 20 might do what you want as a short term option.

This might have unintended consequences though, so it's not the route I'd go down. Best to make a backup of the database before you make any edits.

Mike