After the recent announcement from Amazon regarding the new Austria Digital Tax Act 2020 lots of Amazon sellers will be wanting to know how to effectively monitor their sales to Austria and other EU countries to ensure that they are not breaching the VAT thresholds.
Amazon recently emailed sellers saying:
Under the Austria Digital Tax Act 2020, Amazon has an obligation to share identity and transactional data on selling partners making sales to Austrian customers with the Austrian Tax Authority. This identity data includes the selling partners VAT registration number in Austria. Amazon may suspend selling privileges to customers in Austria if this is not provided.
They went on to say if a seller is required to be VAT-registered in Austria, they must provide their Austrian VAT Registration Number on Seller Central by December 31, 2020.
The following non-exhaustive list of transactions are subject to Austria VAT and trigger a VAT registration obligation in Austria:
– You are established in Austria and make taxable supplies in excess of €30k per year
– You are established outside of Austria and store goods in Austria for sale to customers
– You make distance sales of goods to customers in Austria, delivered from another EU country, and the value of these sales exceed €35k in the current or prior year.
The same rules around storing inventory and distance sales thresholds applies to all EU countries although the actual threshold limits vary. See the below list (correct at time of publishing):
Step 1: Download the Amazon VAT Transactions Report
On Seller Central navigate to: Reports – Fulfilment by Amazon – Amazon VAT transactions report. This report includes information on all of your supplies to all countries from your European seller account. You will need to download the report for each month of the current calendar year as the thresholds are annual thresholds.
Step 2: Filter to show sales to Austrian customers
Open the VAT reports you have downloaded in Excel. In each one, apply a filter to the top row and filter the column “SALE_ARRIVAL_COUNTRY” to show only “AT” for Austria.
Step 3: Sum up the net sales value
For each report sum up the total net sales value from the “TOTAL_ACTIVITY_VALUE_AMT_VAT_EXCL” column. Take note that some of these values may be in GBP and other in EUR so be sure to convert the GBP ones to EUR since the Austrian threshold is in EUR.
Step 4: Repeat the above for all other EU countries
It is wise to check all EU countries each month to ensure you have not breached the distance sales thresholds and need to register for VAT there.
Yes! With Link My Books we offer the Distance Sales Threshold Monitor, which is included on all plans and available during the free trial too.
The monitor shows sales values to all EU countries as a progress bar towards their individual thresholds to make it nice and easy to see which countries you have hit and which countries you are close to hitting. These are shown on a year to date basis (calendar year).
We also show which countries you have stored inventory that is in a sellable condition in, during the current calendar year. This allows you to at a glance see which countries you need to look into registering for VAT.
If you are already a Link My Books user then you will see this new tool under the Accounts & Taxes menu.
If you’re not a Link My Books user but you would like to test this tool or Link My Books in general, then please start a free 14 day trial here.
For more information on this tool please see our help document.
***DISCLAIMER***
The team at Link My Books are happy to provide users with technical assistance in applying tax rules to their Link My Books setup. We are not Tax Advisors and so our advice and suggestions on the application of tax rules cannot be construed as tax advice. We highly recommend that users seek advice from qualified accountants for their tax compliance.
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