Your VAT return is a diagnostic

There is one question I ask every operator I meet, and it is not about their till. It is this: how long does your VAT return take?

Everyone knows the answer immediately. Nobody has to look it up. And the answer tells you almost everything about how connected their systems are, because a VAT return is the one job that forces every number in the business through a single door once a quarter.

What the answers mean

A few hours means the systems reconcile themselves and a human checks the result. About a day is normal and nothing to be ashamed of. A few days means somebody is pulling numbers from three places and stitching them together by hand. The best part of a fortnight means the stitching has become someone's job, and the business is paying a quiet salary for the privilege of its systems not talking to each other.

It is not an accounting problem

The instinct is to blame the bookkeeper or buy better accounting software. But the return is slow because the numbers arrive broken: card takings in one export, till sales in another, delivery platforms in a third, none of them agreeing about what a Tuesday was worth. The accountant is not slow. The accountant is doing archaeology.

Fix the joins between the systems and the return collapses to hours on its own. I have watched it happen at venues that had stopped believing it was possible. The fortnight was never the cost of tax. It was the cost of the gaps.