How do I charge the right tax to EU customers at a trade counter?

Short answer: the correct treatment depends on your registrations, where the goods are going and whether the buyer is a business — which is exactly why it should be decided once with your accountant and configured into your POS, not worked out per order at the counter.

Why the counter is the wrong place to decide

Cross-border VAT has real rules, and they hinge on facts your counter staff should not be adjudicating mid-sale: is the customer VAT-registered, are the goods being exported, who arranges transport. Get it wrong and the invoice is wrong — in whichever direction, someone eventually notices.

The setup that works

1. Decide the policy once. Sit down with your accountant, map your common EU scenarios, and agree the treatment for each. Official guidance lives at gov.uk and europa.eu.

2. Configure it into the POS. A POS with a team-wide tax setting applies your decided rate and label to every order, automatically. To be clear about what that means: it is one rate and one label for the whole operation — not automatic per-customer or per-country calculation. If your EU sales run through a dedicated operation with one agreed treatment, that single setting is exactly enough; if different customers genuinely need different treatments, that is a process and paperwork question, not one a counter till should be improvising.

3. Capture the evidence. Whatever your policy requires — the customer’s VAT number, export evidence — build collecting it into account setup, not into each sale.

The failure mode to avoid

“Ask Dave, he knows the export stuff.” Institutional knowledge in one head is a process that breaks on Dave’s holiday. Configuration beats memory.

Trade Order POS now carries a team-wide Locale setting — currency symbol, tax rate, tax label, default country — so the rate you decided on is the one every order gets. Find out more →

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.