Any accountants? Question about claiming back VAT

[humptynumpty]

We are recently VAT registered, trying to get my head around the whole thing.
Question is: If a buy a printer (for example) in tesco for business use and get a till receipt, is this enough to claim back the VAT. The till receipt shows the tesco name and address and VAT number but the VAT is not itemised separately. Can I work out the VAT and claim it back myself or should I have asked for a special receipt?
Hope that makes sense.
I mean if printer cost £100, I would calculate VAT is £17.50 and claim £17.50 back???
Any help gratefully received.

Er, more profit using the fixed rate scheme.

Mranchovy, HMRC promised to talk me through the fixed rate scheme but don't think they will be able to make a recommendation to you over the phone unless you have some previous figures for them to use to calculate the savings you could make by switching scheme.. doesn't really help if you are just starting out with VAT...

With the Flat Rate Scheme you can keep simplified records - in summary you claim no VAT back on any of your costs/purchases and only pay a % of VAT on your gross profit.

Good luck!

No, you pay a percentage on your turnover.

For a cafe the percentage is currently 11%, but there is a discount of 1% for the first year of registration.

So if your sales in the first year (including VAT) are £100,000, you would pay the VAT man £10,000 - it doesn't matter how much VAT there is on your purchases (although if you buy any capital items, like funrniture, you can claim the input VAT for these).

Now if we assume that 90% of your sales are standard rated (it is probably more than that, so this is conservative) you would have output tax of 90% x £100,000 x 17.5% = £15,750. Now because most of what you are buying is food, your may only be paying input VAT on, say £20,000 of inputs (this is probably a bit high, which again is conservative) - so £3,500 of input VAT. That means that using the 'proper' method you will pay £15,750 - £3,500 = £12,250 to the VAT man.

So using these figures, you would be nearly £2,250 better off using the flat rate scheme - and because I have used conservative figures, it is probably more than that. And the administration is much easier.

You need to have turnover below £150,000 to use the flat rate scheme.

I meant gross turnover. Sorry!