The four VAT positions one UK dwelling can carry

One customer, one week, one electrician — and four different VAT positions on the same invoice. A landlord asks for a full rewire and a new consumer unit in a house that has stood empty for three years, plus an air source heat pump and a battery in the same property. The rewire and the consumer unit are reduced-rated at 5 percent, because the dwelling has been empty for more than two years. The heat pump and the battery, because you are installing them, are zero-rated. The EV charge point the same customer wants at the flat they are living in meanwhile is standard-rated at 20 percent — that dwelling is not the one that stood empty. And if a contractor rather than the landlord engages you for part of it, that part may carry no VAT at all, because the customer accounts for it.

That is not an exotic case. It is a Tuesday. It is also the single hardest thing to ask of the software an electrician runs the business on, and it is the reason a tool built for a booking-and-invoice workflow starts to hurt about six months in.

The rate is a property of the line, not of the invoice

The mistake sits in the data model, which is why you cannot work around it later. Software that stores one VAT rate per document can produce that rewire invoice only by splitting it into three or four documents, or by overriding the total by hand. Both answers are wrong for a different reason: the first confuses your customer, the second breaks the audit trail HMRC now asks you to keep.

VAT Notice 700/22 is explicit about what has to exist for every supply you make: the time of supply, the value of the supply and the rate of VAT charged. It then asks for a period summary "split between standard-rate, reduced-rate, zero-rate, exempt, and outside-scope supplies". A system that knows only one rate per invoice cannot produce that split honestly — it can only produce it after somebody has retyped something, and retyping is precisely what the notice rules out: "HMRC does not consider the use of 'cut and paste' or 'copy and paste' to select and move information, as a digital link."

Zirko stores a tax rate and a tax category on each line of a document rather than on the document, and refuses to finish a document where a line's rate and its category contradict each other. What Zirko does not do is decide which rate a job carries — whether a dwelling has genuinely been empty for two years is a fact about your customer's building, and no software can look at it.

The 2027 date nobody puts in the quote

The zero rate on energy-saving materials is the most quoted VAT fact in the UK electrical trade and the most often quoted without its expiry. VAT Notice 708/6 sets it out plainly: the zero rate runs "from 1 May 2023 to 31 March 2027", and "from 1 April 2027 onwards these will revert to the reduced rate of VAT of 5%."

Two consequences follow, and both are commercial rather than technical.

The first: a quote for a solar and battery install with a long lead time can cross the date. The tax point decides the rate, not the day you wrote the quote. If you are quoting in late 2026 for installation in the spring, the customer needs to know which side of 31 March 2027 the price assumes.

The second: batteries, water source heat pumps and smart diverters were only added to the list in February 2024 — and the notice is equally clear that installation is the condition. "If you supply energy-saving materials without installing them your supply will be standard-rated." The battery you fit is zero-rated. The identical battery you sell over the counter to another sparks is 20 percent.

Section 2.2 of Notice 708 carries the part that saves the most arguments on site: "if their work is zero-rated or reduced-rated, then so are the 'building materials'." The cable follows the labour. Your software has to let it.

Two reverse charges with the same name

This one costs real money because the words are identical and the boxes are not.

The construction domestic reverse charge under section 55A of the VAT Act 1994 applies between VAT-registered businesses inside the CIS reporting chain. It has three exits that an electrician meets constantly, all of them in HMRC's technical guide: it does not apply to an end user who "tells their supplier or building contractor in writing that they're an end user"; it does not reach standard-rated items "included in a zero-rated supply of building and construction services"; and "if the reverse charge part of the supply is 5% or less of the whole supply value this can be disregarded". The invoice then has to say so, in words such as "Customer to pay the VAT to HMRC" or "VAT Act 1994 Section 55A applies". The full decision tree is in when your invoice must not show VAT.

The other reverse charge arrives in your inbox. Checked on 21 September 2026, ServiceM8's UK pricing page states: "Due to the nature of ServiceM8's services, prices do not include VAT. ServiceM8 will issue you reverse charge invoices for you to account for VAT to HMRC." That is the general business-to-business rule for services bought from a supplier outside the UK. It has nothing to do with construction, it has nothing to do with CIS, and it goes in different boxes on your return. An electrician who files both under one mental heading will file at least one of them wrong.

What the software bill itself tells you about the market

Two pricing models are on sale in the UK and they suit opposite shapes of business. Checked on 21 September 2026:

• Tradify prices Lite, Pro and Plus at £34, £37 and £44 per user per month, with a 14-day free trial. The page does not say whether those figures include VAT.
• ServiceM8 prices Starter, Growing, Premium and Premium Plus at £25, £59, £119 and £269 per business with unlimited users — but meters the plans by jobs per month: 50, 150, 500 and 1,500 respectively.

The second figure is the one that catches electricians specifically. A three-van outfit doing small domestic callouts can burn through 150 jobs a month without the turnover of a single firm doing six large rewires. Job count and revenue are not the same axis, and a plan priced on job count will punish exactly the domestic reactive work most electricians live on. Before comparing headline prices, count last month's jobs — the number is usually a surprise.

Notifiable work is three jobs, and it has not changed

Nothing in the tax position touches building control, and it is worth keeping them apart in your head and in your filing. Regulation 12(6A) of the Building Regulations 2010 requires a building notice or an application for building control approval with full plans where the work consists of:

(a) the installation of a new circuit; (b) the replacement of a consumer unit; or (c) any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location.

That is the complete list for a dwelling in England, and the three routes to signing it off are set out in which electrical jobs are notifiable and how to certify them. What matters here is that the certificate and the invoice are two separate documents about the same job, produced at different moments, and the thing worth asking of any job management system is whether it keeps them attached to the job rather than to whoever happened to raise them.

Labour, materials and the CIS split

If you subcontract, a fifth position appears on the same job. CIS deductions are taken from the labour element only, at 20 percent for a registered subcontractor and 30 percent for an unregistered one — the mechanics are in 20 percent, 30 percent or nothing at all. Which means your line items need to distinguish labour from material for a reason that has nothing to do with costing: the deduction is computed from one of them.

Most electricians find out that their system cannot make the distinction at the moment they are asked to issue the payment and deduction statement, which is a month too late. The contents an invoice needs before any of this applies are in the fourteen particulars of regulation 14 and the 250-pound simplified form.

The same invoice, priced twice

Take the work from the opening and put two numbers beside each other. Rewire and consumer unit in the dwelling empty for three years, £6,000 of labour and materials. Battery and heat pump installed in that same property, £9,000. EV charge point at the customer's occupied flat, £900.

Priced by an electrician whose software carries one rate per document, the safe move is 20 percent across the board: £15,900 net, £3,180 VAT, £19,080 to the customer.

Priced line by line at the rates the notices actually give — 5 percent on the work in the long-empty dwelling, zero on the installed battery and heat pump, 20 percent on the charge point at the occupied flat — the VAT is £300 plus nothing plus £180, so £480. Same customer, same week, same law: £2,700 of difference, all of it in the customer's pocket and all of it a reason they chose you over the next quote.

That is the whole argument for caring what the data model does. Not compliance. Price.

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Position as at 21 September 2026, checked against VAT Notice 708 and 708/6, VAT Notice 700/22, HMRC's reverse charge technical guide and regulation 12 of the Building Regulations 2010 as published on that date. This describes the law in England for building control and the UK for VAT, and it is not tax or legal advice. The date to put in the calendar is 31 March 2027: the zero rate on installed energy-saving materials ends that day and reverts to 5 percent, so any quote with a lead time into spring 2027 should say which rate it assumes.

What Zirko does here: it carries a tax rate and a tax category on every line of a quote or invoice, keeps the certificate, the photographs and the invoice attached to the job rather than to the person who raised them, and stores what was issued instead of letting an issued invoice be edited. What Zirko does not do: it does not decide whether a dwelling has been empty for two years, it does not notify building control, and it does not issue BS 7671 certificates — those come from your scheme provider and your test instrument software.