Aqilla (1910) is the first Autumn release and contains some amazing new features, with particular focus on speeding up the whole process of submitting data to HMRC at both headquarter and operating subsidiary level to decrease time-consuming inter-company reconciliations along with any potentially erroneous and expensive delays.
The principal enhancements in release 1910 include:
It is now possible to define multiple companies in Aqilla that submit a single VAT return to HMRC MTD. The companies may exist in multiple Aqilla instances or within a single instance.
Only one company in the group can be used to submit the return to HMRC (Company C in the diagram to the right). This is identified in the Company VAT Reporting setup by VAT Group Role = VAT Group. The other companies that form part of the group are defined as VAT Group Role = VAT Subsidiary.
Once a company has been defined as the VAT Group an additional settings option is available (or it can be accessed in the separate VAT Group Settings function under the Configuration tab).
This function provides the definition of what other (subsidiary) companies make up the VAT Group.
When a subsidiary is created in this function a Client ID and Client Secret is generated, which is used in the setup of the subsidiary companies to define the connection to the group company.
Additional information is available to monitor the progress of the submissions of the subsidiary companies and view their individual VAT returns.
Within the subsidiary companies, VAT Group Settings defines the connection details to the VAT Group company.
The process is for each subsidiary company to create their own VAT return using the HMRC VAT MTD function under the Reports tab. This behaves exactly as the standard MTD VAT processing except when the report has been finalised it is submitted to the VAT Group using the option Submit to VAT Group.
The company defined as the VAT Group creates its own VAT return in the same way, but an additional column is displayed in the VAT return showing the Group return. When all the VAT returns are complete, the Group return is submitted to HMRC.
A number of additional selection criteria have been added to the Debtor Statements function:
NOTE: The method of selecting which account to print from the list of accounts has been changed to Select rather than Suppress. Thus, the default is to print none rather than print all.
A new icon has been added to allow attachments to be viewed using a single mouse click.
A new configuration option has been added to specify a company specific prefix to be inserted in the automatically generated document references. For instance, an instance consisting of two companies e.g. “Daisy Cleaning” and “Tulip Catering” could send invoices with references “DAISY INV00001” and “TULIP INV00001”. Please contact support at support@aqilla.com if you wish to change any document prefixes.
The behaviour of some dropdown lists has changed when there is a required value and there is no default value. Previously, the first value in the list has been used whereas now the user must explicitly select a value.
With the extended use of VAT Codes particularly when using VAT Adjustment documents, it is now possible to limit which codes are available to the different types of document.
