A controversial policy of HMRC has always been that a business using, for example, the cash accounting scheme and spreadsheets to digitally record their expenses had to record every single purchase invoice in a digital format, even though the business might make a single payment to a supplier based on a statement covering perhaps 40 or 50 different invoices.
It would be sensible for the business to just make a one-line entry on the spreadsheet based on the payment total. With the cash accounting scheme, input tax is only claimed when payments are made to suppliers. That policy has now changed.
The latest update from HMRC on 5 May 2019 allows the supplier statements to be used to record expenses for input tax purposes – a big time saving for many businesses that adopt spreadsheet accounting.