Importing, Exporting, and Copying Your VAT Setup

Authoring a complete VAT code table row by row is tedious — a realistic Hungarian workspace needs dozens of codes plus the dimension rows behind them. AI Finance Team therefore treats the whole VAT setup as one portable unit: export it to a single Excel workbook, edit or author it in Excel and import it back, or copy a proven setup from one workspace to another in two clicks.

The five tables involved are described in VAT master data.

The Five-Sheet Workbook

Export VAT Setup (on any of the five Master data → VAT tabs) downloads one .xlsx file with five sheets — Partner VAT Groups, Product-Service VAT Groups, VAT Rates, Calculation Methods, and VAT Codes. The file is a complete snapshot: archived rows are included (marked Archived = yes), and VAT code rows reference the dimension sheets by code, never by internal identifiers.

A freshly created workspace exports a small but valid workbook — that file doubles as your empty template for hand-authoring. There is no separate template download.

Useful conventions inside the file:

  • Dates are YYYY-MM-DD. Percentages are plain numbers (27, not 27%). Yes/no columns accept yes/no (and their Hungarian and German equivalents).
  • The exported file has two header rows: English on top, your workspace's language underneath. When importing, either row's vocabulary works — a file with only Hungarian or only German headers imports fine. Just don't mix languages within one sheet.
  • Sheet names stay English — the importer recognises sheets by these fixed names.

Importing

Import VAT Setup accepts the same workbook shape back. The import is a strict two-step flow:

  1. Validate & preview. The file is checked completely with no changes made. You see, per sheet, how many rows are new, updated, unchanged, and how many have errors — with an expandable list naming each error's sheet, row, and column.
  2. Confirm & apply. Only after you confirm are the changes applied — all of them atomically. If anything fails, nothing is committed.

Any error blocks the entire import. The preview makes fixing the file cheap: correct the named rows and upload again.

What the import does — and deliberately doesn't do:

  • Rows are matched by their code (for VAT codes: the accounting code or the AIFT code, per your workspace's uniqueness setting). Matched rows are updated; unmatched rows are created.
  • Nothing is ever deleted. A row that exists in AI Finance Team but not in your file is left untouched. To archive via file, set its Archived column to yes explicitly.
  • Sheets missing from the file are skipped — a file containing only the VAT Rates sheet is a valid single-table import.
  • One upload may introduce a new dimension row and a VAT code using it: sheets process in dependency order.
  • Renaming a default row via import detaches it from the system defaults, exactly like renaming it in the editor. (See VAT master data on default rows.)

Guardrails: files up to 5 MB, up to 2,000 rows per sheet.

Copying From Another Workspace

Rolling one proven setup out across a firm's client workspaces doesn't need a file at all. Copy from workspace… (next to the Import button) lists the workspaces of your organisation where you hold an accountant role; pick the source and you get the same preview — new / updated / unchanged per sheet — before anything is written. Confirming applies the source's complete current setup (archived rows included) with exactly the import's rules: match by code, update or create, never delete.

Who Can Do What

  • Export — every workspace member, client roles included (the VAT tables are visible to them read-only anyway).
  • Import and Copy — accountant roles only.

Each confirmed import or copy is logged; the Last import line near the buttons shows when and by whom the setup was last bulk-changed.

Tips

  • To review or discuss a client's VAT setup, export it and share the file — it reads naturally in Excel.
  • Re-importing an unmodified export is a no-op (everything reports unchanged) — safe to use as a round-trip check.
  • To bulk-edit one table, export, edit that one sheet, delete the other four sheets, and import.