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Operating in Europe

One chain from a transaction to a filed figure, and four markets that each regulate a different link in it.

Guides published
12
Topics covered
3
Markets
20
Currencies
10

What is different about operating here

Europe does not have one hard tax problem, it has one chain — a transaction becomes a line, a line becomes a document, a document is produced by a program, and a figure is filed at the end — and the four markets researched here each regulate a different link in it. The United Kingdom regulates the chain itself: under Making Tax Digital the path from the underlying record to the submitted figure has to be a digital link, so transcription anywhere along it breaks the rule rather than merely being untidy. Ireland regulates the line: five rates run at once and which one applies is a determination about what was sold, line by line, where a wrong rate still balances perfectly. The Netherlands regulates the document: an invoice has mandatory particulars, and the buyer's identification number and a reverse-charge legend are properties of the page rather than of the calculation. Portugal regulates the program: invoicing software is certified by the tax authority and listed on a public register, and document series are registered before anything is issued — a question that comes before capability entirely. Read that way the guides here are useful in a market we have not researched, because the first question in any of them is which link the local rule attaches to. They are also unusually direct about our own gaps: our purchase orders carry no tax at all, an invoice line gets our organization's default rate or zero and nothing between, our invoice omits particulars two of these countries require, and we are on no European register. We file to no European authority, we have no payroll engine for any of these countries, and we have no reference customer in Europe.

Three things that catch teams out

  1. 01

    Ask which link the rule attaches to before you ask whether it is supported

    Every vendor supports VAT. The useful question is which object the local rule binds — the record, the line, the document or the program that issues it — because each one fails differently and only one of them is a settings screen. A rule about the document is a template change. A rule about the line is a schema change. A rule about the program is neither, and no roadmap closes it.

  2. 02

    A shared framework is not a shared implementation

    EU VAT is common in structure and national in nearly every detail that costs money: the rates, the filing route, the mandatory particulars on an invoice and the timetable for e-invoicing are all set nationally, and two of these four markets are outside the union or its VAT area anyway while running the same shape of obligation. Treat "we support EU VAT" as a statement about arithmetic, and ask the country question separately.

  3. 03

    Find the obligation nobody can sell you

    Most compliance gaps are quotable — a field, a report, an integration. A few are not, because the authority accredits the software rather than inspecting the output, and a vendor that is not already listed cannot become listed on your timetable. Establish early whether your market has one of those, because it is the only kind of gap where the honest answer is a different vendor for that one job rather than a delivery date.

Every module, and where the guides are

Tax is two of these ten. AWRA OpsHub runs inventory, procurement, assets, sales, point of sale, HR and payroll, finance, projects, helpdesk and reporting as one system, and all ten work in every market — the presets below only decide what a rate field is pre-filled with. 2 of the ten have a guide written for Europe; the rest point at the method guides, which hold wherever you run them.

Tax and currency presets for this region

These are the sales-tax presets AWRA OpsHub ships with, 20 of the 102 countries covered in total. They are headline national rates and a starting point for configuration — reduced, zero-rated and exempt categories still need setting up against your own chart of accounts, and rates change with each finance act.

Market Currency Tax Standard rate
United Kingdom GBP British Pound VAT 20%
Ireland EUR Euro VAT 23%
France EUR Euro VAT 20%
Germany EUR Euro VAT 19%
Netherlands EUR Euro VAT 21%
Italy EUR Euro VAT 22%
Spain EUR Euro VAT 21%
Sweden SEK Swedish Krona VAT 25%
Poland PLN Polish Zloty VAT 23%
Portugal EUR Euro VAT 23%
Austria EUR Euro VAT 20%
Belgium EUR Euro VAT 21%
Switzerland CHF Swiss Franc VAT 8.1%
Denmark DKK Danish Krone VAT 25%
Finland EUR Euro VAT 25.5%
Greece EUR Euro VAT 24%
Norway NOK Norwegian Krone VAT 25%
Czechia CZK Czech Koruna VAT 21%
Hungary HUF Hungarian Forint VAT 27%
Romania RON Romanian Leu VAT 21%

12 Europe guides

Grouped into 3 topics, newest first within each.

Accounting Insights

7
Accounting Insights 12 min

An Input Tax Amount With No Rate Cannot Answer the Question

Six facts are needed to decide whether tax on a purchase is recoverable. An amount is one of them, and it is the least discriminating. Includes a correction to two of our own market pages.

Read
Accounting Insights 11 min

Five Rates, Two Outcomes: Irish VAT and the Invoice Line

Ireland runs five VAT rates at once. Most systems offer one default and a zero override, which covers the two commonest cases and fails silently between them — including, in ours, by charging the standard rate when you ask for a reduced one.

Read
Accounting Insights 10 min

One Rate Per Country Is a Modelling Choice, Not a Fact

A table with one row per country claims each country has one rate. True for most. For the rest it is a category error — and ours does not merely inform, it writes the value into an organization's settings and never revisits it.

Read
Accounting Insights 11 min

Sometimes the Regulated Thing Is the Software, Not the Invoice

Most tax rules describe a document. A few describe the program that issues it — accredited by the authority, listed on a public register, issuing from series registered in advance. That is a different kind of requirement, and no feature comparison can answer it.

Read
Accounting Insights 10 min

A Number That Is Not Your Own: What a Document Series Actually Is

Every system numbers its invoices sequentially and almost none of them can tell you whether the sequence belongs to you. Ours could not, and we went and looked: for four document types the counter is reconciled against a number unique across the whole platform.

Read
Accounting Insights 10 min

Three Reasons for a Zero, and Two Places to Put Them

Zero-rated, exempt and reverse-charged all print as nothing and mean different things for who accounts for the tax and what can be recovered. Our schema has two values for the three, no value for the third — and charges the standard rate if you invent one.

Read
Accounting Insights 11 min

An Invoice Is a Legal Document, Not a Receipt for a Calculation

Software is shortlisted on whether the tax comes out right. In the Netherlands a cross-border invoice carries no tax at all, and what makes it lawful is a name, a number and a sentence on the face of the document — three things our own invoice template does not print, though the database holds all of them.

Read

Implementation & Rollout

4

Integrations & Data

1

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