Ex VAT Prices: What the Number on the Page Actually Means

A chair listed at £100 will take £120 out of your bank account. The extra £20 is VAT, added at checkout, and it is the only number on the site that grows between the listing and the payment screen. Every price on deskwell.co.uk is an ex VAT price. That is the convention across the trade, and it matches how most of our customers keep their books. If you have not bought office furniture from a trade site before, it is worth five minutes.

Why our prices are ex VAT

Most people buying from us are VAT registered businesses. They reclaim the VAT on their next return, so the ex VAT figure is what lands in their accounts and what they budget against. Show them a VAT inclusive price instead and you have handed them a division sum on every line before they can compare anything.

Our terms put it plainly. Prices are shown excluding VAT unless stated otherwise, and VAT is added at the rate in force at the point of sale. That rate is 20% as I write this.

There is a line of microcopy on the shop that says it better than I can: everything is shown ex VAT, with VAT added at checkout, so what you see is what your accounts see.

The arithmetic, once

Going up, multiply by 1.2. £100 becomes £120. Coming back down, divide by 1.2, and £120 becomes £100 again. To pull the VAT out of an inclusive figure, divide by six: £120 over six is £20.

The divide by six trick is the one worth keeping. It works on any receipt you are ever handed, ours included.

On a real product: the Ariel mesh back task chair is £100 ex VAT, so £120 with VAT on. VAT registered, your cost is £100 and the £20 comes back to you. Not registered, your cost is £120, and that is the number to budget from rather than the one on the listing.

Compare like with like

One thing this catches people out on. The RRP we print beside our price is ex VAT too. The Ariel lists at £254 and we sell it at £100, and both of those are before VAT.

Where it gets messy is comparing us against a consumer site, because consumer sites quote inc VAT by law. Our £100 next to somebody else's £120 is not the win it looks like if their £120 already has the VAT in it. Put both prices on the same footing before you decide. I would rather you did that and found us cheaper than took our word for it.

What this means for the price band pages

We publish pages that cut the catalogue by budget. Office chairs under £250, office desks under £250, and so on down the list. Those bands use the same ex VAT figure as every other price on the site, because a different one would be a lovely way to confuse everybody.

So a page headed under £250 is showing you chairs that cost up to £300 with VAT on. If a budget cut turns out to be too narrow, back out to the full computer and task chairs category and filter from there instead.

Working to a VAT inclusive budget? Divide it by 1.2 before you pick a page. A £300 all in budget is a £250 ex VAT budget, and that page is bigger than most people expect.

If you cannot reclaim VAT

Plenty of buyers cannot. Sole traders below the registration threshold, some charities, some schools, small partnerships. If that is you, the inclusive number is your real cost and an ex VAT display is a nuisance rather than a convenience. Sorry about that. The convention is not ours to change, but the sums above will get you to the number you need.

What does help is that VAT is added at checkout, so the total is on screen before you commit to anything. Standard delivery is free as well, which means the goods plus VAT is usually the whole bill. Paid delivery and installation options exist, and they are priced on the page before you choose one.

What we do not do

There is no handling fee waiting at the last step, and nothing appears on your order after you have typed your card details. We do not ask you to ring for a price so we can work out what you look like you can afford.

The price on the listing, plus VAT, plus whatever delivery you picked. That is the bill, and you see all of it before you pay.

I spent years building sites that worked the other way round. Not doing that again.

If a price on our site ever fails to add up, tell us. That is a bug, and I will fix it.