The 7 VAT treatments you can select
The editor's VAT-treatment dropdown is grouped — Domestic / EU cross-border / Third country / Special schemes — with a plain-language description per option:
- Standard — a normal invoice with VAT at your country's rate.
- Domestic reverse charge — domestic B2B where the recipient owes the VAT (construction is the classic case).
- Reverse charge (EU B2B) — a service to an EU business with a valid VAT-ID. Highlighted in the dropdown because it's the most common cross-border case.
- Intra-community supply of goods — goods to an EU business; needs the customer's VAT-ID plus proof of dispatch.
- Export (third country) — a supply outside the EU, tax-exempt.
- Small business (non-VAT) — you are not VAT-registered; the exemption notice is printed on the invoice.
- Other exemption — for exempt supplies that need an explicit reason code.
Your default scheme and rate live in Settings → Tax, together with your VAT registration status, VAT-ID, tax number, invoicing country, and — if applicable — your small-business declaration.
The VAT notice writes itself
Several treatments legally require a specific notice on the invoice ("VAT to be accounted for by the recipient", the small-business exemption wording, and so on). You never type these yourself: the correct notice is generated by the system and shown read-only in the editor, exactly as it will print on the PDF. Notice texts exist in German and English, and the reverse-charge and intra-community notices additionally cover the main EU languages.
If you hand-type something that looks like a VAT notice into the free-text notes, the editor warns you — non-blocking, but a nudge that the system already handles it.
VIES — validating EU VAT-IDs
For EU cross-border B2B treatments, the customer's VAT-ID is checked against the EU's VIES register. In the editor, the customer's VAT-ID shows an inline status badge with an on-demand re-check button. The rules:
- Reverse charge (EU B2B) and Intra-community supply require a VAT-ID with a valid VIES result before you can finalize.
- Domestic reverse charge requires the customer to have a VAT-ID as well.
- A valid check older than 30 days is flagged as stale — re-check before issuing.
- If a customer has no VAT-ID on file, the schemes that need one are grayed out until you add it.
- Intra-community supply of goods additionally asks you to confirm proof-of-dispatch evidence at finalize.
The VAT-ID lives on the customer record, so a validated ID benefits every future invoice to that customer.
Wrong-VAT protection
Showing VAT on an invoice that shouldn't carry any can make you owe that VAT — just because it's printed. TaxItEasy guards against this class of mistake at two levels:
- In the editor: choosing any zero-rate scheme (reverse charge, intra-community supply, export, small business, other exemption) locks every line item's VAT rate to 0%, with a toast explaining why.
- At finalize: hard blocks make sure a non-VAT-registered company or a small-business invoice can never show VAT, and reverse-charge or intra-community invoices can never carry a VAT rate other than 0%.
These are guard-rails against the common failure modes, not tax advice — when in doubt about which treatment applies to a transaction, ask your tax advisor.
Related
- Create and send an invoice — where the treatment, notice, and totals come together
- Products and the article catalog — VAT rates on catalog items are validated per country
- Credit notes and cancellations — corrections are dated into the current VAT period
- Invoice numbering sequences — the numbering half of invoice compliance