A full VAT return, not a single add-or-extract — your sales, purchases and expenses for the period, netted into what you actually owe, with zero-rated and exempt supplies kept properly apart and the filing date attached. The same computation that runs inside Core Ledger.
Nothing in the ledger yet. Add the sales, purchases and expenses for the period, or load the worked example, and the return builds itself.
Sales, purchases and expenses. Nothing leaves your browser.
Add your sales, purchases and expenses for the period and the return, the trend, the filing position and the pre-filing checks all build themselves.
Core Ledger computes it from the books rather than beside them — so the filing position is visible before the 21st rather than discovered after it.
VAT is a tax on consumption collected in instalments along the chain. You charge 7.5% on your taxable supplies — that is output tax, and it was never your money. You are charged VAT by your own suppliers — that is input tax. Each period you remit the difference. For a fully taxable business VAT should wash straight through, leaving only what your customers actually bore.
The distinction that costs businesses real money is zero-rated versus exempt. Both put no VAT on the invoice, so they look identical to a customer. They are not the same thing at all: a zero-rated supply is taxable at 0% and stays inside the system, so input tax on it is still recoverable. An exempt supply is outside the charge entirely, and the input tax attributable to it is not recoverable — it becomes a cost the business absorbs. A business with exempt supplies has to apportion its input tax, and that is where the arithmetic gets real.
Two mechanical things worth getting right. VAT in a gross figure is found by dividing by 1.075, not by taking 7.5% of the gross — those give different answers, and the second one is wrong. And a claim for input tax is only as good as the tax invoice behind it: the VAT was genuinely paid either way, but without documentation the recovery is the first thing to go on audit.
Read the full Nigeria Tax Act 2025 guide →General information, not tax advice. Edge cases — exempt supplies, non-resident treatment, the professional-services carve-out from small-company status — turn on facts a calculator cannot see.
