Release Notes 12th January 2023 (1.0.2.6)
This release includes 3 pieces of new user functionality and some further changes HMRC have requested to the anti-fraud information we send. As previously we do not retain the data within our software.
Please note the Governments recent announcement delaying mandation of Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax Self Assessment (ITSA) until April 2026. Government announces phased mandation of Making Tax Digital for ITSA – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
It is currently Springboard IT’s intention to provide support for this requirement but we have delayed any further review of the project until closer to the mandation date.
Discontinue VAT Numbers
After 4 years of use we are seeing businesses evolve and with that evolution we see some companies ceasing VAT registration and our users have expressed a wish to use their licences for different companies.
To that end we have added the capability to discontinue a VAT number on the system.
An MTD License permits submissions for a fixed number of VAT numbers depending on the number purchased. The discontinue functionality excludes the number from the count of VAT numbers in use and allows a new number to be used in its place.
Please note: Once discontinued a VAT number cannot be re-enabled or re-created.
The history of submissions for the old number is retained in case of future reference.
The process for discontinuing is as follows:
Use the right click button on the mouse to bring up the context menu:
You will be presented with the opportunity to reconsider your decision:
Reverse the order of submissions display
A small change to display the list of submissions for a VAT number in reverse date order with the most recent return at the top.
Reverse the sign on a VAT value for inclusion in the submission
This functionality has been added to deal with the situation where VAT reports use strict accounting principles and show Credits as negative numbers and Debits as positive. This can result in VAT reports used for submissions showing Sales values as negative values.
To deal with this situation we have added the ability for any Box value to be have it’s sign reversed when transferred to the VAT Box on the submission screen.
The effect is to reverse the sign, negative to positive or positive to negative:
31st March 2021 (1.0.0.22)
Update to provide the new wording for the VAT Boxes post-Brexit
3rd August 2020 (1.0.0.19)
This update is quite small – improved messages around the authorisation process. Customers are starting to find that the 18 month authorisation period that HMRC have in place is expiring.
HMRC do not pass back a message that says “Your 18 month authorisation period has expired” they simply say “Your authentication token is invalid” – we have had to put a more user friendly explanation in place as most customers have forgotten the 18 month duration.
We have also provided a button to perform the re-authentication early – Restart HMRC Authorisation
28th January 2020 (1.0.0.18)
HMRC have upgraded the communication security used by the making tax digital service. They are switching to use a newer communication protocol which avoids known weaknesses in the previous version of the protocol.
We have upgraded our MTD software to use this new protocol in advance of HMRC blocking access using the old protocol.
https://developer.service.hmrc.gov.uk/api-documentation/docs/authorisation
For the nerds among you (or those that are just interested) the old protocol was TLS 1.0 (Transport Layer Security) and the new one is TLS 1.2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
6th September 2019 (1.0.0.16)
Due to a Windows Update on Windows 10, this caused users to not be able to enter a new VAT Number, this has been resolved in this update.
13th June 2019 (1.0.0.15)
We have had a request to be able to print VAT submissions, this has now been added.
We have also added the ability to enter an Agent ID on the VAT Details screen, this now must be used if you are using the software as an Agent. The Agent ID is required so we can keep connecting to your account and not for each VAT Number, making the process much smoother.
23rd April 2019 (1.0.0.12)
We have become aware that the initial settings for the tick box Use the Test Sandbox in the VAT Details Maintenance screen has caused problems. Until this release the box is automatically ticked and then cannot be changed once the VAT details have been saved.
With this release the box is now no longer ticked by default and the value can be changed up until the point that the VAT number has been successfully authenticated with HMRC.
12th April 2019 (1.0.0.11)
It came to our attention at the start of this week that our International customers who want to submit VAT returns on behalf of UK Entities were experiencing problems. This was because we were assuming that PC’s are set to UK regional settings. We were expecting numbers with £ signs on the front and commas as a thousand separator etc. This was not happening, and was causing our programme to experience problems.
We will continue to display figures with £ signs within the Making Tax Digital display screen, but we no longer expect the rest of Excel to have UK Regional settings. The intention is to make it clear that the figures that the bridging software will submit are assumed to be in pounds.
In addition we have taken some steps to improve the display of errors returned by HMRC communications. This is based on user experience.
31st March 2019 (1.0.0.10)
At the request of HMRC we have added extra data into the messages that we send them to support their fraud prevention changes.
As we are sending extra data about your machine and our software we have updated our privacy policy to reflect that.
We do not retain the extra information we send within our software.
28th January 2019
Updated help based on HMRC information on load/update of Application
13th December 2018
Public Release