Until now, VAT on the Rooby dashboard has shown as tracked but not live, a placeholder that told you VAT registration was on file, without a real figure behind it. For a specific set of clients, that's changed: Rooby now calculates and shows a real VAT number, built the same way an accountant would build it by hand.
How the figure is actually built
The calculation pulls three things directly from Xero for the quarter: sales invoices, purchase invoices, and credit notes, a detail that's easy to skip if you're glancing at a sales tax report rather than reconciling properly, since credit notes sit on a separate endpoint from invoices and get missed by anything that only looks at one. Bank transactions for the same period are checked against the invoice-derived figure, and the whole thing is cross-referenced against the trial balance's VAT control account to flag if something doesn't reconcile.
That's a meaningfully different thing from a projection or a percentage of turnover. It's the actual quarter's transaction data, assembled the way a return would be.
Who it applies to
Right now, this is live for clients who meet all of the following:
- Registered on the standard VAT scheme
- Filing quarterly
- Connected to Xero with the expanded read scope that includes bank transaction data
Everyone else still sees the previous tracked-but-not-live treatment, and that's deliberate rather than a gap we haven't gotten to yet:
- Flat rate scheme clients get a percentage of gross turnover, not an invoice-level input/output split, there's no equivalent calculation to build from invoice data, so flat rate VAT is shown as an estimate from the trial balance's VAT control account instead, clearly flagged as unverified.
- Cash accounting clients need a calculation built around payment dates, not invoice dates, applying the standard method to a cash accounting client would give the wrong figure, so it isn't applied there yet.
- Non-quarterly filers (monthly or annual accounting scheme) aren't supported by this calculation yet.
- Clients who haven't reconnected Xero with the newer, wider read permission still see the older estimate until they do, the bank transaction data this calculation depends on isn't available under the old, narrower connection.
✓ If your dashboard still shows "tracked, not yet live": it's almost always one of the four reasons above: check your VAT scheme, filing frequency, and whether Xero needs reconnecting. Your accountant can confirm which one applies.
What this replaces
Previously, every VAT client, regardless of scheme, was estimated from the trial balance's VAT control account balance. That's a reasonable approximation in general, but it doesn't distinguish between what's actually been posted for the current quarter and unrelated adjustments sitting in opening or closing balances. It was the best available number without invoice-level data; it was never meant to be the final answer.
Still an estimate, not a filed return
Even for eligible clients, this figure is a calculated estimate built from live Xero data; it isn't a submitted VAT return, and it doesn't replace your accountant reviewing the numbers before filing. Where the trial balance and the invoice-based figure diverge by a meaningful amount, that's flagged directly rather than silently reconciled, since a real posting difference is exactly the kind of thing worth a second look before the return goes in.
💡 Rooby tip: The full breakdown (output VAT, input VAT, sales and purchase invoice counts, bank transactions checked, and any trial balance divergence) is shown alongside the headline figure, both for the accountant and, where eligible, on the client's own dashboard.
This is the same underlying work that's already gone into how Rooby handles flat rate and cash accounting differently rather than treating every VAT scheme the same: the standard-scheme quarterly calculation is the first piece of that to go live, not the whole picture at once.
Rooby calculates VAT live from Xero for standard scheme, quarterly clients, with the full workings shown, not a rough estimate.