Many businesses have a need to sell goods at the lower VAT rate of 5.00%. Examples of this might be sales of cycle helmets, fuels, or sanitary protection products for women. Not all versions of the Ob-serve Retailer system have this VAT rate set up as standard. An amendment to the system is available for supported customers to download from this site - please follow carefully the steps below to ascertain whether you need this or not.

1. In your Ob-serve program, check the version number you have by pressing the F2 key. A 6-digit version number will be shown in the box - eg. 000811 or 990728 next to the program number Sr.12.

2. If your program is not number Sr.12, please contact Ob-serve Support for further details.

3. If your version number starts with 00, you do not need to download the fix. Follow steps 5 onwards below instead.

4. If your version number does not start with 00, download the update utility by clicking here. The utility will automatically add the 5% VAT rate to your system. You may wish to amend the nominal code entry rules to help avoid users making entry mistakes as detailed in section 7 below (You can now skip sections 5 and 6).

5. From the main menu choose: Maintenance - Maintenance Menu 2 - VAT Configuration - VAT Calculation Preferences.

6. You should be able to see fields called Positive Rate 1, 2 and 3. Rate 2 needs to be changed to 5.00 if it is not already set up as such. No other fields need be changed. Accept your entries and return to the main menu.

7. Users of the 'Direct Calculation' and 'Apportionment' VAT schemes must ensure that they enter stock invoices or statements from 1st January 2001 with this 5% figure separated out. To do this you will need to check the Entry Rules for your stock purchase nominal code(s) and set the 5% rate to YES (see further details in section 8).

8. You may wish to amend the Entry Rules for the various nominals in your system so that the new 5% VAT rate is only available to choose where appropriate. This is not essential, but may help avoid mistakes when entering data. When the rate is first added to your system, it may be active for every nominal. To change this, from the main menu choose Maintenance - Setup Menu - Nominals (Departments) and then whichever set of nominals you wish to amend. For each nominal you can set whether the nominal will ever have entries made at the 5% rate. Leave the entry rule in the 5% column as YES if this is the case. If it is not appropriate to make entries at 5% VAT choose NO. If you wish to make entries at 5% VAT as the default for this nominal choose 1ST. See chapter 10 of your manual for further details about setting up nominals' entry rules. If you are unsure for which nominals to allow/disallow the 5% rate, your accountant will be able to advise (or contact Ob-serve support).

9. Your system is now configured to use the new VAT rate.