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The standard rate is 20% and there is nothing interesting to say about it. What shapes the work is Making Tax Digital: the return is filed from software through HMRC's interface, and the chain from your underlying records to the submitted figure has to be a digital link — re-keying a number or copying a cell between spreadsheets does not count. That turns a filing question into a data question, and a data question has a checkable answer. We do not file to HMRC and this page never pretends otherwise. What it does instead is go box by box through the return and say which figures our schema can produce, which it can produce badly, and which it cannot produce at all. One of the nine is genuinely broken, and it is the one every business cares most about.
The rule behind the whole page
Under a paper regime a gap in the records is filled by a person with a calculator, and the return is still a true return. Making Tax Digital removes that option: the figures have to reach HMRC through a chain of digital links from the records themselves, and manual transcription between systems is not a link. So a box our data cannot produce is not an inconvenience to be absorbed by somebody careful — it is a box that has to be produced somewhere else, by a system that does hold the data, which for most businesses means their accounting package or their accountant's.
That has a clean architectural consequence and it is the honest recommendation of this page: in the UK, let the system that owns your purchase ledger own your VAT return. AWRA is where the operational work happens — procurement, approvals, receipts, stock, projects, payroll cost attribution, sales documents — and the return is assembled where the input tax actually lives. Anyone selling you a single system that does both, without having built the purchase-side tax to do it, is describing a spreadsheet with extra steps.
Measured, not estimated
Box numbering follows HMRC's VAT return. The state of each is a fact about our own database on 5 August 2026, not a forecast — the grid above is drawn from this table, so it cannot drift away from it.
VAT due on sales and other outputs
A tax rate sits on every invoice line, every POS sale line and every quotation. This is the box our data is genuinely good at.
VAT due on acquisitions from EU member states
Northern Ireland only. Nothing in the product distinguishes an acquisition from an ordinary purchase, and there is no purchase-side tax to put here anyway.
Total VAT due
Boxes 1 and 2 added. Correct exactly as far as its inputs are.
VAT reclaimed on purchases and other inputs
This is the finding. A purchase order carries no tax at all. An expense carries a tax amount and nothing beside it — no rate, no tax type — so nothing in the record can tell a recoverable input from a blocked one, a standard rate from a zero rate, or a net figure from a gross one. An amount with no rate is worse than nothing here, because it looks fillable.
Net VAT to pay to HMRC or reclaim
Box 3 less box 4, which means it inherits box 4's problem in full. This is the number that gets paid.
Total value of sales and other outputs excluding VAT
Net sales, which the sales documents hold directly.
Total value of purchases and other inputs excluding VAT
Purchase orders and expenses carry values, so a figure can be produced. Whether it is the right figure depends on whether your accounting event is the order, the receipt or the invoice — a distinction the product does not make for you.
Total value of dispatches of goods to EU member states
Northern Ireland only. Not held.
Total value of acquisitions of goods from EU member states
Northern Ireland only. Not held.
What this costs in practice
The return is nine boxes and your data fills six of them
The sales side of a UK return is the easy half and most systems do it. The input tax half is where returns go wrong, and it is where a system with no tax on a purchase order has nothing to offer.
A digital link is a property of the whole chain
It is not enough for the last step to be an API call. If a figure was typed in at any point between the record and the return, the chain is broken at that point, and the fact that the submission itself was electronic does not repair it.
Purchase approvals and VAT recovery are the same records read twice
The evidence a finance team needs to reclaim input tax is the same evidence a procurement process produces — an order, an approval, a receipt, a document. Most organizations hold both and connect neither.
Nobody can tell you what is recoverable from a total
Partial exemption, blocked entertainment costs, mixed business and private use: all of them turn on facts about the purchase rather than about the amount. A single tax figure with no rate and no type beside it has already thrown those facts away.
Scope, in three parts rather than two
Three columns, because "no" means two entirely different things and one list hides which is which. This is the furthest page from Nairobi in the corpus, so the middle and right-hand columns are the ones to read first.
Real today, and none of it is a filing claim
Not built yet — and commissionable
What we would decline, and would rather say now
The three gaps that matter here are one piece of work in the right order: tax on the purchase side, then a nine-box return assembled from it, then transmission to HMRC. The first is a schema change and it is the one without which the other two are theatre. The precedent is real rather than rhetorical — eTIMS transmission and a maintained statutory payroll engine were both built to specification for one market and are part of the product now. Usual terms: a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed before anything starts. No dates on a public page, and we would rather turn the work down than describe a UK VAT capability we have not built.
One correction we owe a careful reader. Our Liberia and Trinidad pages state that there is no tax on the purchase side anywhere in the product. That is true of purchase orders and it is not quite true overall — `expenses` carries a tax amount, and this page counts it as the reason box 4 would be filled badly rather than left empty. Same schema, a finer reading, and we would rather write this paragraph than leave two pages disagreeing.
Operations in the United Kingdom
Everything above counts how much of a nine-box return our records can fill, and that count is honest. But a UK operation spends far more of its year evidencing something other than VAT: that the person on site is allowed to be there, that the hoist was inspected, that the supplier was chosen properly and could be shown to have been. Those are record-keeping problems with dates attached, which is the shape of problem this product exists for.
HR records
Right-to-work documents with an expiry on a person
The document stored against the employee record, with custom fields for the expiry, so a lapsing permission is something you can filter a list on rather than something you discover. We hold the record; performing the check is yours — a vendor that offered to make that determination for you would be selling you its liability.
Assets
Statutory inspection intervals on lifting and electrical equipment
Register, custodian, location, movement history and an inspection and service record per asset. Your regime sets the interval — thorough examination periods for lifting equipment are the common case — and the evidence sits on the asset, which is where it is asked for.
Prequalification
Framework and public-sector buying needs the trail, not the order
Supplier applications reviewed and approved through a recorded pipeline, with certificates, insurances and dates held per supplier and an expiry that has a consequence. Selling to public bodies means being able to show how a supplier qualified, not just that they invoiced.
Supplier records
Supply-chain due diligence you can evidence per supplier
Certificates, questionnaires, performance history and documents held against the supplier record. A published supply-chain statement is only as good as the file behind it, and the file is the thing that is usually missing when someone asks.
Projects
Job costing with the commitment checked before it is made
Labour and purchases attributed to a job and a cost centre as they are entered, and a budget check at the point of commitment rather than a variance report a month later.
Helpdesk
An SLA engine for internal IT or customer support
Intake portals, queues, routing, escalation and SLA clocks, with the backlog and the breach visible rather than inferred from how loudly people are complaining.
What this section does not quietly claim. There is no UK payroll engine — no PAYE tables, no National Insurance, no RTI submission, no auto-enrolment assessment — and no Construction Industry Scheme deduction handling, which is the second thing a UK contractor asks about. Labour cost attribution to jobs and cost centres exists and is not payroll. Both are on the commissionable list above, with Kenya as the evidence that we finish that kind of work.
Before you buy anything
Ask where each of the nine boxes comes from today
Not which system files the return — which record each figure originates in. Most organizations can answer for boxes 1 and 6 immediately and go quiet on box 4, which tells you where the work is.
Trace one figure back to a transaction without retyping it
Pick last quarter's box 4 and follow it back to the individual purchases behind it using only exports and system links. Wherever you have to read a number off a screen and type it somewhere else, that is where the digital link is broken.
Decide which system owns the return before you buy anything
The answer is usually the one holding the purchase ledger. Deciding it first turns a long integration argument into a short one about which exports need to exist.
Questions we are asked here
Can AWRA file my VAT return to HMRC?
No. There is no MTD integration, no HMRC connection and no bridging submission in the product today — on the roadmap, and commissionable now. What the work involves is a schema change to carry tax on the purchase side, a return assembled from it, and then transmission through HMRC's interface with the authorisation and testing that requires. The precedent is Kenya: eTIMS transmission is a live tax-authority integration we built and maintain, so this is a known shape of project rather than an experiment. We would give you a written specification, a timeline and a price before anything started, and we will not put a date on a public page.
You say box 4 is broken. What exactly is missing?
A rate and a tax type on the purchase side. A purchase order and its lines carry no tax at all; an expense carries a tax amount with nothing beside it to say what rate produced it or what kind of tax it is. So we could show you a number and we could not tell you whether it is recoverable, whether it is standard-rated or zero-rated, or whether it is net or gross. On the roadmap, and commissionable now — it is the first item in the sequence and the one that has to exist before a return means anything.
Could we not just type the missing figures into our filing software?
You can, and it is the thing Making Tax Digital was written to stop. The requirement is a digital link along the whole chain from the records to the submitted figure, and manual transcription between systems breaks it wherever it happens — the fact that the final submission is an API call does not repair a typed step three stages earlier. This is why the page counts boxes rather than describing features: a box your system cannot produce is a box that has to be produced by a system that can.
Do you handle UK payroll — PAYE, National Insurance, RTI, auto-enrolment?
No. On the roadmap, and commissionable now. There are no PAYE tables, no NI calculation, no Real Time Information submission and no pension auto-enrolment assessment. What exists is labour cost attributed to projects and cost centres, which is useful and is not payroll. The work is well-defined and we have done its equivalent once: Kenya's statutory payroll engine is ours and maintained. A written specification, a timeline and a price, agreed first.
Will you tell us which purchases we can reclaim VAT on?
A boundary rather than a backlog. No, and it will not change with a commissioned build. Whether an input is recoverable turns on facts about your business — partial exemption method, private use, whether a cost is blocked — and those are determinations your accountant makes and signs. Software that offered a view would be inviting you to rely on it, and the protection here is that we hold the evidence in a form your adviser can work from rather than reaching a conclusion nobody would stand behind.
Can our data be held in the UK or the EU?
Two halves, and they have different answers. On the roadmap, and commissionable now: a UK or EU-region deployment is a real thing we would do, priced as a piece of work, because hosting region is a property of a deployment. A boundary rather than a backlog: it is not a per-organization setting and we will not describe it as one. There is no column, no flag and no switch that puts one organization in a different region from its neighbours, and the sub-processor register is a single list that applies to everybody on a deployment. Our compliance matrix claimed otherwise until 5 August 2026; it now says this, with the correction marked.
Our finance system is fine. We have a site and equipment problem. Does that fit?
Better than the VAT half does, and it is the half this page under-sells. What a British operation usually needs proved is not a rate: it is that the person on site had current permission to be there, that the hoist had its examination, that the supplier was qualified before the order and could be shown to have been, and that the job's cost was committed against a budget rather than discovered afterwards. Those are records with dates on them held against a person, an asset, a supplier or a job — which is what this product is. Right-to-work documents and expiry fields on the employee record, inspection and service history on the asset, a prequalification pipeline with certificate expiry that has a consequence, and three-way matching on the purchase side. The VAT boxes above are then a reporting handoff rather than the reason you bought anything.
Do you have UK customers we can speak to?
No. A boundary rather than a backlog, at least for now, because it is a fact rather than a feature: this product was built in Nairobi for East African operations and its live tax-authority integration is Kenyan. If a UK reference matters to your decision — and it reasonably might — that is a good reason to choose something else, and we would rather write that sentence than have you discover it in month three. What we can show you is the same class of work done elsewhere and the specification discipline behind it.
Further reading
Everyone audits the submission. The break is almost always three steps earlier, at an adjustment nobody thought of as data entry — and the reason is usually a purchase record that never held a rate.
Six facts are needed to decide whether tax on a purchase is recoverable. An amount is one of them, and it is the least discriminating. Includes a correction to two of our own market pages.
Written by a vendor that does not file your return, has no UK payroll engine and no UK reference customer. Which is a strange sales position and a useful vantage point — there is nothing left to protect except the argument.
Next step
The honest UK conversation starts with which system owns your purchase ledger. If the answer is that you want it to be this one, the work is a schema change, a return and a transmission, in that order, with a specification and a price before anything begins.