Although you have options in Sage Line 50 / Sage Accounts 50 as to how you handle the UK VAT rate change as of 1st December 2008 - dependant upon whether you are on 'Standard VAT' accounting or 'Cash VAT' accounting.

What Sage users may have forgotten to consider in their Sage Line 50 accounting system are:

• non-updated invoices, sales orders, pro-formas, quotations
• non-delivered or updated purchase orders
• recurring bank entries
• memorised journals
• memorised invoices, sales orders, pro-formas, quotations

There are rumours that Sage UK may issue an updater for the non-updated invoices, sales orders, purchase orders and pro-formas, but assuming this is true and there was no mention of this on Sage's website this weekend, this does not seem to include recurring invoices.

Changing the VAT tax rate for T1 from 17.5% to 15% or adding a new tax code for the 15% will not automatically update these non-updated or memorised transactions.  They will have to be done manually in order to load the 15% VAT rate.  

Current clients - do not worry as we have a utility to update all your recurring invoices, quotations and proformas to the new VAT rate of 15% and we will have contacted you already to get you updated.

• If you are on 'CASH ACCOUNTING' then you will have to change the T1 tax code to the new rate of 15% as of the 1st December 2008. Otherwise you will not be able to match up receipts / payments to the sales / puchase invoices in the Sales and Purchase Ledgers. 
• If you are on 'STANDARD VAT ACCOUNTING' then you have a choice as to whether you amend the existing Sage T1 tax code to 15% from the 1st December 2008 or whether you create a new Sage tax code for the 15% VAT from the 1st December - remember that the VAT rate is intended to revert back to 17.5%
• If you have 3rd party addons to your Sage accounting program that produce your sales invoices and feed into Sage via the import or XML routines then you will probably be restricted to the options available from the 3rd party integration and you will need to contact your 3rd party Sage addon vendor - unless, of course, you have one of our Sage addons, in which case we will have already contacted you and addressed and resolved any VAT issues relevant to your business.