The OSS scheme explained: how VAT works for EU sales

OSS stands for One Stop Shop: a single point of contact for the VAT on your sales to consumers in other EU countries. In the Netherlands, this is officially called the unieregeling (Union scheme).

Here's the problem it solves: if you sell to a consumer in, say, Belgium or Germany and need to charge local VAT there, you would technically have to register and file a separate return in each of those countries. For a webshop delivering to ten EU countries, that's simply unworkable.

With the OSS scheme, you instead file one separate quarterly return with the Dutch Belastingdienst covering all that foreign VAT together. You pay a single amount, and the Belastingdienst distributes it to the EU countries involved. The EU has harmonised the VAT rules for these so-called distance sales, so webshops across the Union work with the same system. You can find general information on EU VAT rules at europa.eu.

The scheme only becomes relevant once you cross the EU-wide threshold of €10,000 per calendar year. A few rules around this are often misunderstood:

• The threshold applies to your total cross-border sales to consumers across all other EU countries combined — not per country.
• It only covers sales to consumers (and buyers without a VAT number), not business-to-business deliveries to companies with a valid VAT number.
• Stay under the threshold, and you can simply charge Dutch VAT and handle everything through your normal return.
• Cross the threshold, and from that point on you charge the VAT rate of your customer's country: a German customer pays the German VAT rate, a Belgian customer the Belgian one.

You can also choose to apply the destination country's rate voluntarily from the start, even while you're still under the threshold. That can be useful if you already expect to cross it and don't want to change your prices halfway through the year.

In practice, the Union scheme works like this:

1. Register. You sign up for the Union scheme through the Belastingdienst. This is done online via the business portal.
2. Charge VAT per country. From the moment you register, you apply the VAT rate of the customer's country to your EU consumer sales.
3. File a quarterly OSS return. Every quarter, you file a separate OSS return, listing the sales and VAT owed per country. This is separate from your regular Dutch VAT return.
4. Make one payment. You pay the total amount to the Belastingdienst, which forwards it to the other EU countries.

Important to remember: the OSS return doesn't replace your regular VAT return. Your domestic sales and input VAT stay on your normal quarterly return; only your foreign consumer sales move to the OSS return.

Relevant to you if:

• you run a webshop delivering products to consumers in other EU countries and you're above the €10,000 threshold
• you sell through marketplaces such as bol.com or Amazon to consumers elsewhere in the EU — that revenue counts towards the threshold too
• you offer certain digital services to EU consumers

Not relevant (or relevant in a different way) if:

• you make business-to-business deliveries to companies with a valid VAT number: those are intra-Community supplies with their own rules, outside the OSS
• you sell to customers outside the EU: that's export, which usually qualifies for the 0% rate
• some platform sales: in specific situations, such as goods imported from outside the EU, the marketplace itself may be responsible for remitting the VAT

That last category needs close attention. If you sell across multiple channels and countries, check per sales flow who's actually remitting the VAT — you or the platform — before you put everything in your OSS return.

The OSS scheme makes filing simpler, but it does place demands on your record-keeping. For every sale, you need to be able to show which country the customer is in and which VAT rate you applied. In practice, that means:

• tracking revenue per EU country, so you can see the threshold coming and fill in your OSS return country by country
• applying the correct VAT rate per destination country, including whenever rates change
• keeping invoices and sales records in good order in case of an audit

Doing this by hand is error-prone: every EU country has its own rates, and you need to apply the right one to every order. This is exactly the kind of thing worth automating. slimzaak supports the EU OSS scheme out of the box: it recognises the customer's country, automatically applies the correct VAT rate to invoices from your webshop and marketplace orders, and produces VAT summaries you can use for both your regular return and your OSS return. That way, your admin scales effortlessly as you start selling across borders.