How to manage VAT on your European sales invoices with the OSS portal

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Does part of your revenues come from sales outside of Belgium? This is great for your business, and we see an increasing number of users who are doing the same.

Did you know that if you make more than €10,000 in online sales to private individuals in Europe, VAT must be declared and paid via the OSS portal?

Here is a quick guide on how it works:

0- If you remain below the €10,000 threshold

You must apply VAT to all your invoices to individual customers. For simplicity's sake, you can apply the Belgian VAT rate of 21% (automatically applied to invoices in the app). This VAT will be automatically included in your quarterly declaration.

1- What is OSS?

The European One-Stop-Shop or OSS system makes it easier to manage local VAT rates in EU countries.

You run an online store and deliver goods to private individuals in Europe? Then you are supposed to sell at a price including VAT, applying the local VAT rate instead of the Belgian VAT rate.

For example: you sell a 100€ item in France. Because you will collect the VAT in France, the price paid by the customer will be 120€.

Since you are not a registered business in this country, you are expected to declare and pay this VAT in Belgium. This is what the OSS system does. Important: you need to start declaring on the OSS when you have reached the threshold of 10.000 € sales over Europe.

2- How to encode revenues in Accountable for your income tax calculation?

Accountable doesn't manage other VAT rates than Belgium, and will not prepare the OSS declaration for you. However, we are working on a solution to make this possible in the future.

For now, you would need to invoice clients and compute your VAT returns manually.

3- How to declare and pay VAT on EU sales to private individuals?

In order to manage the European VAT collected from your sales, you have to go to Intervat every quarter and declare the revenues made with European VAT rates. Afterwards you'll of course need to pay the VAT amount due to the Belgian government.

Good to know: this has no impact on your Belgian VAT declaration. That VAT still needs to be submitted and paid separately.

So how do you need to submit it? On this page the different steps are explained with screenshots. We have added this explanation below:

• After logging in on Intervat, you choose for "OSS - EU e-commerce"

• Go to "Dashboard", click on "Return" and choose for "Declaration by screen"

• Choice of scheme: choose for "Union scheme (BE)" and fill in your VAT number

• Select the quarter and the year of the declaration

• Fill in the grids per foreign VAT

You can visit this official website to get more information about OSS.

For any further questions, you can reach out to us.

Author - Valesca Wilms

As content marketing lead at Accountable Belgium, Valesca writes about freelancing, self-employment, and taxes based on her own experience as a freelancer.

Who is Valesca ?