It’d be great for doing my VAT tax returns if my purchases would have a suggested VAT tax rate based on my (and other businesses) purchases to the same company in the past
Alongside this, it’d be great to see a link to a Monzo help page with more info on what items you can typically claim back VAT
Surely this depends on what you buy, not where you buy it from?
This would cause more problems than it solved!
I think I know what you mean, the second one the below link might be useful
But I’m not sure how monzo could automatically suggest something as it can’t even get the basic merchant right sometimes due to limited data so my guess is it would be more right than wrong which would have tax implications. On the basis the business was turning over enough to be vat registered of course
I don’t think this would work.
Different retailers sell different goods at different VAT rates e.g. if I spend £100 at Tesco on a bunch of different goods they will all be rated at different rates. It’s not helpful to me to say either “it’s a supermarket so it’s food so 0% VAT” or “well it could all be VATable so better safe than sorry, 20% VAT”. In the former case (assuming you can reclaim VAT on the transaction), you’d be underclaiming VAT you could have reclaimed, in the latter you’d be overclaiming.
Ultimately Monzo wouldn’t want liability for tax advice, and with banks being regulated firms people are generally entitled to rely on the things they say. Even if it’s just intended as an indication, someone somewhere will inevitably take it as gospel - there’s no category of warning that could really help with this. Either way, it’s not going to be accurate, so it’s not meaningful.
All it would take is someone going “well Monzo told me I could reclaim £X on this transaction and that was wrong now HMRC want to turn me inside out” and that’s a customer complaint and possible escalation to FOS.
It also strays into Monzo becoming an accounting package rather than a bank - realistically if you want this, you don’t want Monzo, you want something like Xero.
Yeah I understand where you’re coming from
Unfortunately this isn’t even available with Xero. Xero can recognise if you have bought something from a merchant in the past and what you previously marked the VAT percentage is but doesn’t automatically suggest for new merchants.
Feels that some of this VAT information is difficult to locate at times and makes VAT returns a frustrating process.