Has the validation of sales_tax_rate changed?

Hello!

I am trying to create a bank transaction explanation with a sales_tax_rate of 20 but it fails with:

sales_tax_rate must be the AUTO rate or a rate less than 0

I haven’t changed the way I create explanations and it’s never failed like this before. Has there been a validation change at the FreeAgent end?

The call looks like:

curl https://api.freeagent.com/v2/bank_transaction_explanations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d '{"bank_transaction_explanation":{"gross_value":2.5,"category":"https://api.freeagent.com/v2/categories/001","description":"Blah blah","sales_tax_rate":20,"bank_transaction":"https://api.freeagent.com/v2/bank_transactions/123456","marked_for_review":true,"dated_on":"2021-07-09"}}' \
  -X POST

Here’s the data formatted nicely:

{
  "gross_value": 2.5,
  "category": "https://api.freeagent.com/v2/categories/001",
  "description": "Blah blah",
  "sales_tax_rate": 20,
  "bank_transaction": "https://api.freeagent.com/v2/bank_transactions/123456",
  "marked_for_review": true,
  "dated_on": "2021-07-09"
}

Many thanks,
Andrew Stewart

I was able to explain bank transactions dated in 2025.

But transactions dated January 2024 and earlier fail. I haven’t tried transactions from later in 2024.

Is the sales_tax_rate validation dependent upon the transaction date?

(I know it changed at the end of the Brexit withdrawal period but that was in 2020.)

Case closed: this was due to the user changing their VAT status from not registered to registered.