EP Finance Tax UK

EP Finance Tax UK turns what is already in your ledger into the figures a UK VAT return asks for.

This page documents EP Finance Tax UK 0.1.6.

Requirements

PageMotor 0.9b or later
EP Finance, which holds the ledger these figures are computed from

The nine boxes

All nine VAT100 boxes, computed straight from the ledger for whichever period you select, with a drill-down from any box to the transactions behind it. If a figure looks wrong you can see exactly which entries made it.

Your scheme is a setting, never a guess

Standard, cash accounting or Flat Rate. You tell the plugin which scheme you are on; it never infers one from the shape of your data, because inferring it wrongly produces a return that looks plausible and is wrong.

Evidenced and unevidenced input VAT

Input VAT is split into what you hold evidence for and what you do not. That distinction is the thing most likely to be questioned, and having it visible before you file is the point.

Making Tax Digital, honestly

Your records are kept digitally, and the plugin produces a quarterly SA103 export for your accountant or your bridging software. It does not submit directly to HMRC. Direct filing is a clearly-future thing, not a hidden one, and this page will say so plainly until it exists.

Deadlines

A calendar of your filing and payment dates, exportable as an .ics file so it lands in whatever you already use.

Document stamps

Every accountant pack this plugin produces carries a stamp on its cover: a number and the first characters of a fingerprint taken over every other file in the pack.

If somebody sends you a pack, or you open one from a year ago, you can check whether its contents are exactly what was recorded when it was produced. The cover tells you how, in three steps with ordinary tools, because a verification scheme nobody can run is decoration.

It is not a signature. It says nothing about who produced the pack, only whether the contents have changed since. Anyone with access to the database could write a matching record. It protects against accident, drift and quiet edits, not against a determined party with that access, and the cover says so in those words.

Regenerating a pack records a new stamp rather than replacing the old one, so the history itself shows when a period’s figures moved between one generation and the next.

Changelog

0.1.17

SA103 totals follow your accounting method. Choose Cash or Accrual in EP Finance, Setup, Income tax accounting method. On the cash basis an unpaid invoice is left out until it is paid. The totals and their CSV say whether to put an X in SA103F box 10 (traditional accounting). The Making Tax Digital section on this screen says so too.
Books that existed before this update keep the accrual totals they have always had until you choose. Until then this screen and the totals carry a note asking you to choose.
Your VAT scheme is unchanged and separate.
Needs EP Finance 0.8.3. With an older EP Finance, SA103 stays on accrual as before.

0.1.16

The company car table is easier to read. Its columns now have proper spacing and lines between rows, matching the rest of EP Finance, so figures and their notes no longer run into each other. On a phone the column headings wrap so every column stays on screen.

0.1.15

Company car benefit. A new “Company cars” section in this plugin’s settings takes up to three cars: list price, accessories, any amount the employee paid towards the car, fuel type, CO2, electric range, the dates it was available, any 30-day-or-longer spells it could not be used, payments for private use, and whether the company pays for private fuel.
For this tax year and the next it works out each car’s appropriate percentage, car benefit, car fuel benefit and the company’s Class 1A National Insurance, from HMRC’s published rates (2025-26 to 2029-30 for cars, kept as data with their sources).
For 2026-27 these are your P11D and P11D(b) figures. From 6 April 2027 company cars and car fuel must be put through payroll, so for 2027-28 onwards it also shows the amount for each monthly payroll.
Where HMRC has not yet published a figure (the 2027-28 car fuel multiplier and Class 1A rate, expected at the Budget), it says so instead of guessing.
The 2026-27 Class 1A can be posted to your books as an expense and an amount owed to HMRC, dated 5 April 2027, once only.
Shared and classic cars are not worked out automatically; an appropriate-percentage override covers them.
Also available to an AI working on your site as the tax_uk_car_benefit and tax_uk_car_post_class1a actions.

0.1.14

A VAT return file for bridging software. Under each prepared VAT return there is now a “Download VAT return file (.csv)” button. The file holds the nine boxes in the layout free HMRC-recognised bridging software imports (for example My Tax Digital), so you can file your return there without retyping. HMRC counts downloading and uploading a file as a digital link; copying and pasting figures is not.
Boxes 1 to 4 are in pounds and pence, box 5 is always a positive amount (a reclaim shows as box 4 being larger than box 3), and boxes 6 to 9 are whole pounds with the pence left out, as HMRC’s VAT return rules require.
The button only appears when the return can be worked out, so a file of zeros is never offered as a return.
Also available to an AI working on your site as the tax_uk_vat_file action.

0.1.13

Settings language menu. The language menu in this plugin’s settings now lists only the languages it is actually translated into, plus English, so you can no longer pick a language that changes nothing.

0.1.12

The deadline calendar puts the February and May Making Tax Digital updates in the right year. Quarterly updates 3 and 4 (due 7 February and 7 May) were dated a year early, before the tax year had started. Download the calendar again and re-import it; the events keep their identifiers, so your calendar app updates them.
The VAT return now says when it cannot be showing all your VAT: when EP Finance is not set as VAT registered, when the period is before your registration date, and when sales or purchases since your registration date carry no VAT code. With EP Finance 0.8.0 and the updated Sources, Invoicing and Importer, new sales and purchases carry their VAT.
The Making Tax Digital page described an SA103 “CSV/Excel” export that did not exist. The quarterly SA103 totals are now available as a CSV file through the tax_uk_sa103 action (an AI assistant or the API). There is no Excel file and no download button yet, and the page says so.

0.1.11

Box 4 leaves out VAT on receipts marked “not VAT evidence”. If a purchase’s only receipt has no VAT number, its VAT is no longer counted in box 4. It is shown with the other unevidenced input VAT, and a note names each such purchase with its date and VAT amount. Some purchases need no VAT invoice: add back any that qualify, after checking with your accountant.
Purchases with no receipt at all are counted as before. The Flat Rate Scheme is unchanged.

0.1.10

Tax calendar deadlines now end on the right day. On a server whose clock is ahead of UTC (the UK in summer, for example), a deadline in the downloaded calendar file could end on the same day it started, which calendar files do not allow. Each deadline now covers its whole day. If you imported the calendar before, download it again and re-import it. The events keep their identifiers, so your calendar app updates them rather than adding copies.
The accountant pack’s receipts list now covers only the pack’s period. It listed every receipt in your books, from any year, and called them all “attached to a reconciled transaction”. It now gives each transaction’s date and says “reconciled” only for a transaction matched to a bank statement line.
The receipts list shows whether each receipt counts as VAT evidence: Yes or No from EP Finance Receipts, or “Not recorded” for a file attached some other way. The VAT boxes do not change, so check the receipts marked No before you claim input VAT on them.
The pack’s document stamp line uses plain characters (”·” printed as ”??” in some places), and a pack is no longer refused when its stamp cannot be saved: it is built without the stamp line instead.
EP Finance 0.7.13 carries the same fixes. Update both.

0.1.9

The VAT dates in the tax calendar are now right. A VAT return and payment are due one calendar month and seven days after the end of the quarter, which is always the 7th of the second month. The calendar was adding “one month” in a way that overran short months, so some dates landed a day or more early and some landed late: a quarter ending 31 March showed 8 May instead of 7 May, and a quarter ending 31 January showed 10 March instead of 7 March. Every VAT date is now the 7th, for all three quarter groups.
If you imported an earlier calendar file, download it again and re-import it. The events keep the same identifiers, so your calendar app updates them rather than adding duplicates.
The Flat Rate Scheme percentages in the settings help are corrected. Eight of the sector rates listed beside the Flat Rate field were wrong, some too high and some too low: retailing vehicles or fuel is 6.5% (was shown as 9.5%), hairdressing and beauty 13% (10.5%), catering 12.5% (11.5%), general building 9.5%, labour-only building 14.5% (the two were shown as one sector at 12%), repairing vehicles 8.5% (12.5%), manufacturing not listed elsewhere 9.5% (13%), business services not listed elsewhere 12% (14%) and management consultancy 14% (16%).
If you picked your percentage from that list, check it now. The pack uses whatever percentage you typed in, so a rate copied from the old list gave a wrong box 1 on every return. Your saved percentage is not changed for you. Re-enter it if it came from the list, and ask your accountant whether any earlier returns need correcting.
Nothing about the VAT boxes themselves has changed.

0.1.8

The download no longer includes an internal notes file. Earlier versions carried a CLAUDE.md file of developer notes in the plugin folder. Neither the plugin nor PageMotor ever read it, so nothing about how the plugin works changes. If an earlier version left ep-finance-tax-uk/CLAUDE.md on your site, it is harmless and safe to delete.

0.1.7

Works with PageMotor 0.11.3 and stays compatible with earlier releases. PageMotor 0.11.3 changed how a plugin declares its API and MCP actions, and a plugin that still uses the old declaration has every one of its actions silently dropped from the registry on that version. This release declares its actions in the shape the running PageMotor expects, so an AI connected over API or MCP keeps every action whether the site is on 0.11.3 or on an earlier release.
Actions are now grouped into families, so a connected AI that looks up one action is shown its siblings.

0.1.6

Released 9 September 2026.

Every accountant pack now carries a document stamp. The cover page prints a stamp number and the first characters of a fingerprint taken over every other file in the pack, so you can check whether a pack’s contents are exactly what was recorded when it was produced.
The cover explains how to check it by hand, in three steps using ordinary tools.
It is not a signature. It says nothing about who produced a pack, only whether the contents have changed since.
Regenerating a pack records a new stamp rather than replacing the old one, so the history shows when a period’s figures moved between generations.
Requires EP Finance 0.6.0 or later. With anything older the pack is produced exactly as before, without a stamp block.

0.1.5

Released 1 September 2026.

Some of this plugin’s actions used to appear as their own entries in the tool list of any connected AI client. That surface is reserved for PageMotor itself, so those entries have been removed.
Nothing became unreachable and nothing else changed. Every action still works exactly as before through PageMotor’s own dispatch, with identical responses. Only a caller that had been invoking one of those names directly is affected, and it should dispatch through PageMotor instead.