I agree it is a really tricky one, it appears to me that we have three broad options:
- Choose which simple open source system to knock into shape for MTD VAT submissions, I don’t have strong preferences between these three, they all appear to be broadly similar:
- InvoicePlane 2
- Invoice Ninga
- OpenSourceBilling
- Build a client facing UI and MTD VAT plugin for KIll Bill.
- Choose a non-free software invoicing system with MTD VAT support.
Personally I’d really like to avoid 3. if possible, but I suppose that before we can make an informed decision we should have a basic idea of what the options available under 3. are, perhaps we should ask with other people are doing on the CoTech forum?
My concern with 1. is that it would probably be a bit of a bodge, the developers of these programs are not UK based and might not have any other users who are UK based and have a turnover greater than £85k and will therefore probably not want MTD VAT code to be added to the main repo and since they don’t have plugin APIs we might end up having to basically fork the code bases… best avoided — if we are going to do some serious development work we should start with a robust code base.
So 2. looks, in many ways, to be the best option, however there would be a very significant amount of work needed for this, both with learning how Kill Bill works, writing a MTD VAT plugin and also developing a client facing interface — do we have the time / energy / resources to take this on (and the we here would probably mostly be you @nicksellen…)?