UK VAT-registered businesses are required to keep digital records and file VAT returns through Making Tax Digital software — and the part that catches most Odoo users out is not the filing itself, it is the digital link. Odoo core will happily produce a VAT report you can read on screen and export to spreadsheet, but the moment a figure is retyped, copy-pasted, or adjusted in Excel before it reaches HMRC, the unbroken digital audit trail HMRC expects is gone. Odoo's own tax report is also built around a generic tax-grid model: it has no concept of HMRC obligation periods, no view of what you actually owe or have paid, no handling of the Flat Rate Scheme's fixed percentage, no Cash Accounting basis switch, and no partial exemption or fuel scale charge workflow. In practice UK teams end up bridging out to a third-party spreadsheet tool, which reintroduces exactly the manual step the legislation was written to remove.

This module closes that gap inside Odoo. We build a dedicated uk.mtd.vat.return model (a models.Model with @api.depends computes) that derives every one of the nine boxes directly from account.move.line and the UK tax grids on account.tax, so each box value is a stored computed field with a drill-down back to the originating journal items. There is no export-and-retype step: the numbers submitted are the numbers Odoo computed. Around that we build the HMRC integration layer — OAuth 2.0 authorisation with token storage and refresh, the mandatory fraud-prevention header set, retrieval of open obligations, submission of the return, and read-back of liabilities and payments — each exposed as its own model so a failed call is a stored record with a status and an HMRC correlation ID, not a lost log line. Submission is guarded: a period cannot be filed twice, a filed return is locked, and the underlying journal entries for that period can be flagged so late postings surface as a correction rather than silently changing a submitted figure.

On top of the filing core we build the scheme-specific behaviour a UK finance team actually needs. Flat Rate Scheme returns compute turnover-based output tax at your agreed percentage with the limited-cost-business test and the first-year discount handled as configurable parameters. Cash Accounting drives the box calculation from payment reconciliation rather than invoice date, using the reconciled account.partial.reconcile links so the basis switch is data-driven rather than a separate report. Partial exemption support adds a recoverable-proportion calculation with a standard-method annual adjustment, and fuel scale charges post as a scheduled adjustment entry against a dedicated tax so the charge lands in the right boxes without a manual journal. Everything is visible: list, form and pivot views (XML, with an OWL component for the obligations panel), a QWeb PDF submission receipt for your records, and a full posting audit so anyone can reconstruct why box 6 says what it says.

Security and access follow standard Odoo practice — ir.model.access.csv entries for a VAT Filer and a VAT Manager group, record rules scoping returns to the correct res.company for multi-company groups, and HMRC credentials stored per company rather than globally. Automated actions (ir.cron) refresh obligations and liabilities on a schedule so the dashboard reflects HMRC's view without anyone clicking. The whole module is exposed over the standard XML-RPC/JSON-RPC API, so an external process or a scheduled action can trigger a draft-return computation if you want filing to be part of a wider close routine. It runs on Odoo Community and Enterprise; where Enterprise's accounting reporting engine is present we plug into it rather than duplicating it, and on Community we ship the equivalent report views ourselves — the __manifest__.py declares the correct dependency set for whichever edition and series (17.0, 18.0 or 19.0) you run.

This is a build-to-order product, not an instant download. You request a quotation, we run a scoping call to confirm your VAT scheme, group structure, chart of accounts and tax grid setup, and how your data currently reaches HMRC. From confirmed scope, typical delivery is two to four weeks: we develop against your Odoo version, deliver to a staging database for UAT with a dry-run submission against HMRC's sandbox, then install on production with a documented rollback. You receive the full source, technical and user documentation, a training session, and a post-go-live support window.