I have integrated FreeAgent with our app, and we’ve just changed our pricing to be £9.99 inc vat - except this is an IMPOSSIBLE amount to generate an invoice for
£8.32 + vat is being calculated as 9.98,
£8.33 is £10
Has it really never been a requirement to generate an invoice for £9.99? It feels like it shouldn’t be uncommon?
Can you not set your own VAT using the sales_tax_value. Pretty sure VAT is rounded down, so your net value would be 8.33 and then instead of setting a rate you fix the sales tax value at the rounded down amount which brings the total to 9.99?
Can sales_tax_value be set? It didn’t look like it could be in the API. It’s not possible to do so through the main invoice editing screen
Hi Paul,
Ewa here from the Engineering Team at FreeAgent — thanks for your message on our forum.
I can see you’ve spoken to our Support Team regarding this question — I’m afraid in this instance, the API doesn’t offer any additional workarounds compared the the web app. The suggested solution to create an invoice with two line items (one with the unit price of £8.32 and then another line item for 1p), although I understand is not quite what you’re looking for, can also be implemented via the API by passing an array of line items when creating an invoice.
Alternatively, you can decide to generate your invoices outside FreeAgent but still account for them by explaining income to Sales.
As promised, my colleague from the Support Team you spoke to has recorded the ability to calculate VAT in reverse from gross totals as a feature request in our internal system, so it will certainly be reviewed by our Product Team.
Best wishes,
Ewa
Has no one ever wanted to generate an invoice for £9.99 on FreeAgent before? Adding a 1p line isn’t a solution
Hi Paul,
It is possible to have a £9.99 (incl. 20% VAT) invoice in FreeAgent with the right combination of multiple line items, but unfortunately matters gets tricky when dealing with a single line item - because FreeAgent calculates VAT on invoices based on the net price of line items, and because each line item’s value is recorded with precision to two decimal places (so you can’t have an item with base cost of £8.325, which would give you the desired gross total of £9.99). I can see that the ability to calculate VAT in reverse from gross totals has been raised with our Product Team in the past, so please rest assured it’s definitely on their radar. In the meantime, my second suggestion to generate your invoices outside FreeAgent but still account for them by explaining income to Sales (or send outside of FA and just mirror in FA using the 1p workaround) might be better suited to your circumstances for now.
Best wishes,
Ewa
Is there any update on this? I have 180 invoices for £9.99 I need to input. Adding a separate line item for a non-existent 1p item is not an acceptable workaround.
Hi CCebayseller,
Welcome to the API forum, and thanks for your follow up question.
I’ve had a look over the API as well as the main app, and we haven’t added the ability to generate VAT from gross totals in the last year in either place. This means the situation is the same as Ewa described last April, including the two workarounds. Since you’ve indicated that one of these doesn’t work for you, perhaps explaining your income to Sales will? We do have an API endpoint for creating bank account explanations from transactions.
If you have any more questions about how to handle this that isn’t API related, our Support team would be delighted to help you. Or maybe Paul can let you know how they handled this in the end?
Best regards,
James
Are the developers still not wanting to consider the ability to create invoices with Gross amounts? I’m trying to build integration for my ecommerce solution, and I know my clients all want to set their product prices by gross value. Thus my integration would need to upload the gross price for each invoice item. It seems crazy that we can’t do this? Surely you can allow us to upload invoice items with a gross OR net price and you just allow us to stipulate in a new property on the line item whether the price provided is inclusive or exclusive of the vat rate we’re giving you? This could surely be retrofitted without causing any breaking issues because you could default the new property to exclusive of tax as per the current behaviour? Please 
Hello! Claudiu here from the Engineering team.
I can definitely see how this could be very useful to our API users. I’ll bring it up with our Product Manager and mention the existing desire for this, so we can give it more consideration during our next feature request triage.
We’ll try to keep this thread updated in case any decision is made around this.
Best Regards,
Claudiu
Not expecting any update at this point, as having tested this, it’s still not been looked at by the development team.
I just wanted to voice my frustration on this matter. Not only is it annoying that VAT is calculated and rounded up and down per line-item, but this has been a reported issue for over 10 years.
See VAT rounding annoyance - FreeAgent API Discussion Forum; Posted 2012. Big sad.
We would like the option for: