.This is the first VAT change in many years and the first since many Internet Business were created. The first for many people out there.

Already we are seeing customer who are having to work hard to accomadate this change even when they have their business well prepared to cope with changes. But as many of us from Hero have been IT traininers as well as consultants we know there will be Many MS Excel spreasheets out there where folk instead of having a single place to enter the VAT will have simply added into a formula. How many and what impact that could have we don't know.

Worse still is that some databases may have been developed witht he VAT hard coded in, instead of being in a place where it is easy to change. This means the program will need to be altered and redeployed, hopefully at the cost of the developer.

I certainly urge everyone to check their systems and see the possible impact as the clock is already ticking and there is not much time to get the systems right.

This goes to show how important it is to both choose the right developer and also to make sure you staff are trained up as well as possible on the software they use. This is whether it is Microsoft office of Bespoke software. As trainers we saw many bad happens in people using MS office software simply because they did not know another way. Make sure you staff use their software correctly so they are as efficient as possible with it and don't fall into any traps which could have repercussions in the future.

Any we are all off to check our code, there was always one day we might have been feeling lazy!!!