Under the Flat Rate Scheme, you don’t have to set the VAT amount for each transaction. For income transactions, the VAT to pay to HMRC will be calculated based on the transaction amount and the flat rate you have set in your VAT settings. This will automatically be applied to your income transactions and will feed through into the VAT tool. 

For expenses, you can’t reclaim VAT, (unless you mark the transaction as a recoverable capital good). As such, in the bookkeeping feature, you are not prompted to add VAT information to move the transaction to ‘completed’. 

You only need to assign a business category and upload a receipt or an invoice to move the transaction to ‘completed’.