VAT

Value Add Tax.

Not an exciting subject.

But one that is very much in my mind.

We will be registering for VAT shortly.

We're nearing the threshold where we have to.

But we're doing it voluntarily.

Most of our costs will reduce by 17%.

We'll make 17% less on UK sales though.

There's an opportunity to make more money on exports.

Or pass on the savings.

I've been trying to work out how best to pass on the savings on Gamefound.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

I've got two blunt hammers to play with:

Product discounts - which affect everyone, including the UK.

Shipping discounts - which can be tailored by region, but don't directly connect to the order value.

Two blunt hammers.

And a sculpture to carve.

I think I have a solution.

A bit of hammer A, a bit of hammer B.

Cheaper prices for most people.

I hope I get it right and it doesn't end up costing us loads of money! 

Making Progress

After a very busy couple of weeks I'm finally catching up on a few things. I've now received and approved all the proofs and plots for Sumeria and, thanks to a German reader who was paying attention, caught a mistake I made at the proof-reading stage in the German rules. Fortunately, it wasn't too late to get the problem fixed (I'd not yet received and approved the plots) so that didn't cause too much of a problem (though it did cause a bit of a fright!). Sumeria is now all go, all I have to do is approve the corrected German rules and the wooden pieces when I receive them, then sit back and wait for the games to arrive.

Today's first order of business is to meet Brett Gilbert (writer of the Brettspiel blog) in a local café this morning. He's passing through Bedford and wanted to show me one of his prototypes.

This afternoon the reality of running your own business is catching up with me. I've got to do my books for March and then submit a VAT return for the first three months of the year. It's boring, but it's a legal requirement so I've got to get it done.

I've also been going through some of the many submissions I received as a result of my piece for Boardgame News. I've rejected several of them at the second stage (reading the rules) as they were not the sort of games I was interested in, and a couple at the first stage (reading a overview), but a few have made it to the prototype stage, so hopefully I'll be getting a few more prototypes in a couple of weeks. I'm playtesting again tomorrow, so I'll get a chance to play some of the stash of prototypes I've managed to accumulate.

Catching Up

I'm slowly catching up with things post-Essen. The big thing I had to do was my VAT return, which I finished yesterday, great guys on the end of a phone, crappy on-line system :-(

Thursday I spent most of the day getting a lot of our rarely-used junk into storage, so that the flat looks tidier for the estate agent photos and potential buyers. Today I'll also be busy on that, doing a bunch of minor jobs around the flat that we've been putting off. Then the next two days we're away flat-hunting in the South.

The VAT return was good news in some senses, the government owe me lots of money :-) You work out the difference between the VAT you charged your customers and the VAT you paid your suppliers. If you charged more, you pay them the difference, but if you paid more, they refund you the difference. I had to pay for all 3,000 of It's Alive! in that quarter and I didn't sell all of them (and those I did were often zero-rated because they went outside the EU). I eagerly anticipate the resulting cheque!

I've also started contacting people I met (or was supposed to meet) at Essen, chasing up contacts I made. There's some interesting developments afoot...

The next thing to do is to line up distributors and shops for Carpe Astra. The Germans are now saying it might arrive in two weeks time (two weeks ahead of schedule), so I need to sort this out ASAP. Esdevium, JKLMnP, Heidelberger and FRED have all expressed an interest, now I just need to nail them down to a confirmed order. I need numbers! The German manufacturers of Carpe Astra are cheaper, so my margins are better. As a result, I can offer the game to distributors cheaper (proportionally) than I can It's Alive! This will hopefully make it more appealing to them than It's Alive! (since their margins will also be better) and hence easier to sell.

I have also found time to update my website with more information about where you can get It's Alive!, my stockists list is finally beginning to look respectable (i.e. not just UK shops!). I've also heard that the games I shipped to Boards and Bits (via Germany so they could be folded into a container shipment they were arranging) have finally arrived :-)

Aaaahhh!... Panic Over!

Today I'm trying to finish off the box design. I need to send it to the printers along with the rules tomorrow. I've also got a friend visiting this weekend, so I really need to get both finished today. Still, I'm hoping it won't take that long. I've got a starting place (the It's Alive! box design has all the important stuff on it) and I'm definitely getting the hang of Adobe InDesign now.

Back to the title. I've been chasing a couple of shipping companies to get proof that the games I've sent via them have shipped outside the EU, so that I can zero-rate the sales for VAT. In fact I've already not charged the customer VAT so if I don't get the proof the VAT is coming out of my pocket. Obviously I don't want that to happen, so I chased the shippers for the documentation. One of them replied with:

Games? What games? We've not received anything.

Aaaahhh! I sent them weeks ago. The customer has already paid me. Where the hell are they? Check with the couriers. They were apparently delivered on the 11th September. Forward the information to the shipper:

Oh! Those games. Yes, they were received and sent on. Here's the paperwork you asked for.

I swear I've visibly aged today.

In other news, it looks like the German distributor I've lined up will take some stock at Essen. Hopefully they'll take whatever I've got left, so that I don't need to send anything back to the UK.