OSS VAT Return Filing

First of all, you need to add your OSS registration number to the platform. You can do it by selecting “Add VAT registration”, and choosing the country. If you sell goods to customers when the origin and the destination of the shipment are within the EU select the Union OSS scheme. The non-Union OSS scheme can be used only by non-EU companies that do B2C supplies of services within the EU. After this click “Add Registration Info” and your OSS number will be added to the platform.

In our case, the company is established in Latvia and we have already added our local VAT number as well as the OSS registration number. An important thing to mention here is that even in case your company is registered for OSS – you still need to submit your Standard VAT returns in the countries where you are registered for VAT. Also do not forget to check that the box “Calculate Distant Sales Thresholds” is not ticked because if you have registered for OSS this means that you have already exceeded the common threshold of 10 000 EUR for distant sales across the European Union.

After you have added the OSS number to the platform the next step will be the upload of the transactions.

We need to upload the transactions for the quarter, which we need to report. In our case, we have an integration with Amazon so we select the 3rd quarter which will be our first OSS return and upload transactions for this period.

Please note that in case your transactions were uploaded BEFORE you have added the OSS registration number to the platform – you need to delete and re-upload transactions in order for the platform to determine them correctly for OSS return calculation and preparation.

We can see that the Amazon transactions have been uploaded to the Lovat platform for the needed quarter so now we can file our OSS return. To do this we go to the section “VAT returns”, and select ‘Fill VAT return” and then we choose the country, type of return, and the needed period which is 3rd quarter for us.

Click “Next” and on the next step, you can see the breakdown of our Revenue and VAT divided across various countries of the European Union where you had sales. The OSS return can only show sales of your goods and services as any of your expenses can’t be shown in this return.

All sums are determined accordingly to the VAT rates of various countries of the European Union. If you need to change the amounts – you may change the revenue manually and the VAT sum will also change.

As we are filing OSS returns for Latvia this chart won’t show us Latvia in the list of countries because transactions for the sales which we had in Latvia should be reported in our Standard Latvia VAT return. OSS return will only show the data of sales that we had in other countries besides Latvia.

The next step is sales of services by country. It’s similar to the previous step of Sales of goods by country and if we had such sales they would have been also shown here after the upload of transactions. However, you can also add the necessary amount of revenue from such sales manually. After you put this information it will be also shown in your OSS return. 

The next step is the “Corrections” step and it’s filled only in case you have any corrections to your previously submitted OSS return and may show such corrections here. In our case, it’s our first-ever OSS return for submission. So we don’t have any corrections at this moment.

The final step is the “Summary” and once again you can review your Revenue and VAT sums. We can also see that the chart shows our manually added Sales of Services and it has been taken into account for this OSS return. The totals for Revenue and VAT sum are also shown. From now we have several options to proceed. The first one is to download the report.

This report will show the same information as on the LOVAT platform – the reporting period, your company name, your OSS number, and the information about your revenue and VAT amount. You can use this report and its data for transfer to your own tax account if you’re submitting OSS returns by your own means through the tax authorities’ portals.

In case you’re submitting your VAT and OSS returns through the LOVAT platform – you can either Save the report for future submission or Submit it immediately. After choosing the “submit” option you’ll see a message that your OSS VAT return was created and in the “VAT Returns” section you can see the return in “pending” status. The status will change to “submitted” once the OSS return is processed both by our team and tax authorities. You will get a confirmation of submission uploaded to your account and available for download. The filing frequency for OSS returns is a quarterly one and the deadline for OSS returns is always the last day of the month following the reporting quarter meaning that in our case the deadline for the 3rd quarter OSS returns would be the last day of October.