UK Vat change from 17.5 to 15% - How will this affect your code?

Question

The UK VAT system is changing from 17.5% to 15%. What strategies have you used in your code to store the VAT, and how will the change affect your applications. Do you store

Answer 1

I found a table in the code last night that stored important configuration settings for the application.

Table tbl_config
   config_id int
   config_name varchar(255)
   config_value varchar(255)

One of these settings was our main admin username and password combination for the server (unhashed). I guess the dev who created it always wanted access to it in case he forgot! Needless to say, it's disappeared now.

Answer 2

I've a nasty feeling that 2 of the systems I've inherited have the rate hard-coded somewhere.

Worse than that is that if it is hard-coded, I will simply be replacing the hard-coded values as I don't have the time for properly changing it.

Even worse than that, I don't know where I'm going to get the time to actually do the change. So I imagine that it won't be done in time for Monday's change. Of course there are more interesting issues, such as that our £10 subscription is based on being £10 including 17.5% VAT (£8.515 or whatever it is). It'll now be £9.79 or so, making a complete mess of everything that advertises it at £10, and all the site calculations based on £10.

All this because the idiot in charge of the piggy-bank wanted a headline.

Answer 3

We pull the VAT from a database table shared by all of our internal apps meaning it's not a big deal for us where our new code is concerned. Keeping it centralised like this has to be a smart move.