I was at the inaugural Business Cloud 9 Summit earlier in the week, at the uber-swanky Lancaster London Hotel.

This was an opportunity for enterprises to hear from big cloud software providers such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Being run by Sift Media, it was a slick, well organised affair.

My main reason to attend was a “fringe” session, set up so accounting software vendors such as Arithmo could sit and talk pretty informally with Accountants. This went pretty well, and it’s real-world feedback that we need.

Since the session, there has been a lot of online discussion about its merits. I found it useful, but it could have been even better. Here is a good  are some of the comments being made, including some from yours truly…

http://biztwozero.com/Home/486 

http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/topic/technology/showdown-business-cloud-summit

As from the 1 January 2010 the UK’s standard rate of VAT will increase from 15% to 17.5%.

This change does not represent a problem for Arithmo users. The VAT rates applied throughout the system are date driven.  Ensuring that users do not need make any changes to their system, Arithmo takes care of everything.  For those users that use the repeat transaction function then at the point of posting the transaction Arithmo will check that the correct VAT rate is applied, if not users are guided to ensure the correct rate is used.

We have not forgotten about those that calculate their VAT using the flat rate scheme. At the point of calculation users not only choose the rate applicable but can also choose multiple rates for the period. Not only accommodating the change in rate as at 1 Jan 2010 but those whose flat changes mid period.