There is a moment in an Amazon seller's life when their VAT report stops looking like last month's. Not because they sold more, nor because they sold into more countries: because their stock has stopped leaving Spain alone. Rows you had never seen, blocks that double, sales to the same customer as always that are suddenly somewhere else in the summary.
This guide explains what changes inside the file when you hold stock in another country, and how to read it without getting lost. It does not explain which obligations arise from holding it — that is at the end, and it has an owner.
What changes in your report, told from the file
The VAT transactions report is the same file as always, with the same columns. What changes is what those columns carry.
Until now, the country of departure on every one of your rows was the same: Spain. It was a column you could ignore without consequence, because its answer was constant. From the day Amazon moves stock of yours to a warehouse in Italy or Germany, that column starts having several answers — and everything that relied on there being only one stops working.
Two new things appear as well:
- Rows recording movements of your own stock, which are nobody's sale to anybody.
- Your VAT numbers from other countries inside the report itself, on the rows dispatched from there.
That second point matters more than it looks, and we will come back to it: the report does not merely reflect that you hold stock abroad, it carries the proof of where inside it.
Transfers of your own stock: what those rows are
The guide to the report already flagged this when describing what it contains: among the rows there are inventory movements between fulfilment centres, and "if you are on the pan-European programme you will see a lot of these — they are your own stock transfers between countries, and they have their own treatment".
That is exactly what they are. Amazon decides to move units of yours from a Spanish warehouse to an Italian one so it can serve customers there faster, and that movement is recorded as one more transaction in your report.
The first thing to be clear about is what they are not: they are not sales. There is no buyer, there is no income, nothing has changed hands. It has changed place. If you count them as sales you are inflating your turnover with goods that are still yours and that nobody has bought yet — the same mistake at heart as adding the fees to your sales, wearing a different face.
The reader keeps them apart by construction, in a block of their own with the name spelled out. The reader's interface is in Spanish, so what you will see is "Movimientos de stock entre almacenes desde España (no son ventas)" — stock movements between warehouses dispatched from Spain, not sales — one for each country they leave from. They do not enter output VAT, nor input VAT, nor the sales control box, nor the units per product. They are shown with their row count and their amounts, and they get their own sheet in the spreadsheet: outside the totals, but in plain sight, because the file still has to reconcile. And the ones that come through at zero are excluded from the totals like any movement with no economic content.
That they are not sales does not mean they do not count. A stock transfer between countries has its own treatment, and it has one in both countries; what that treatment is and how it is declared is your tax adviser's judgement, not a reading of the report. Here it is enough to know that they go apart: do not add them to what you sold.
The country of departure rules
This is the heart of the guide, and it was already announced in two places.
The guide to the report lists it as the third mistake among those that bend the most returns: ignoring the country of departure. A sale dispatched from Italy to a Spanish customer is not a Spanish domestic sale, and declaring it as one is a mistake with consequences in two countries.
The guide to OSS sales put it as a principle: the origin–destination pair is what turns a row into one thing or another. A sale leaving Spain for a French consumer and one leaving France for that same French consumer are not the same transaction, even though the buyer notices no difference.
With stock in several countries, that principle stops being a theoretical warning and starts describing your whole month. Look at it from the customer's side: the same buyer, the same product, the same price, and two different transactions depending on which warehouse the box left from. The customer does not know. Neither do you, unless you look at the column. The report does know, and it says so on every single one of its rows.
That is why the reader never assumes a country of departure. When a row carries an amount but does not say where it left from, Spain is not awarded to it by default:
These rows carry an amount but state no departure country. None has been assumed: they are left UNCLASSIFIED for you to review.
Assuming there would be convenient and it would be untrue, and one wrongly assumed row takes down the whole block it lands in.
How it looks in the reader: the blocks multiply by country
In the free VAT reader this is not a setting or an option: it is the shape the summary has. A block is its class plus its country of departure. There is no "domestic sales" block to which an Italian nuance is later added; there is a Spanish block and an Italian block, distinct from the first moment.
You see it in the names themselves, which carry the origin inside. They are in Spanish, because the reader's interface is:
| With stock in Spain only | With stock in Italy too | |---|---| | Ventas nacionales (España) — domestic sales, Spain | …and Ventas interiores en Italia (establecimiento permanente) | | Devoluciones nacionales (España) — domestic refunds, Spain | …and Devoluciones interiores en Italia (establecimiento permanente) | | Ventas OSS desde España a Francia — OSS sales, Spain to France | …and Ventas OSS desde Italia a Francia | | Entregas intracomunitarias exentas desde España — exempt intra-Community supplies from Spain | …and Entregas intracomunitarias exentas desde Italia |
A note on that label: "establecimiento permanente" — permanent establishment — is the wording the reader uses to group rows by country of departure. It describes where the goods left from; it does not rule on what your position in that country is — that is settled by your own circumstances, not by a column of the report.
Two blocks with the same destination and a different origin are two different things, and collapsing them would lose exactly what has to be declared separately. That the origin is part of the name is not decoration: it is the only thing keeping them from being mixed.
And you do not have to configure it. The report already carries the answer: every row states which of your VAT numbers the transaction was made under, so the set of those countries is the set of your establishments. The reader works it out and says so:
The establishment countries have been derived from the VAT numbers (NIF-IVA) in the report itself.
But it works it out in plain sight and without applying it silently: before anything is computed it shows you what it found, under the heading "Establecimientos detectados en tu informe" — establishments detected in your report — with Spain marked as the base and the other countries as chips you can remove or add to. Underneath, the note explaining why it matters: sales dispatched from those countries are grouped apart from the Spanish ones, and if one is missing you add it and the figures are recalculated.
Get that wrong and whole blocks move. That is why it is shown rather than inherited.
What the report is telling you, and is worth not ignoring
There is a warning that appears precisely when the file and your establishments do not match. The reader raises it when it finds rows dispatched from a country that is not on your list, and it says this:
These rows ship from a country where you have no establishment on record. Review it: it can point to a pending VAT registration.
It is worth reading slowly, because it is carefully worded and the care is the message.
It says "on record", not "you do not have one": the reader knows what is in your report and what you have confirmed to it, and nothing else. It says "review it", not "regularise it". And it says "can point to", not "points to". Three cautions in a single sentence, and they are there because the warning has two legitimate and opposite readings: it may be that a country is simply missing from the list above — you add it and the warning goes — or it may be that your stock is leaving from somewhere that genuinely has something outstanding. The report cannot tell those apart. You can.
In the meantime, those rows are not forced into any block: they stay unclassified and in plain sight. It is the same rule as always — the tool never balances by hiding rows.
And how far this guide goes
Everything above is reading the report: which row left from where, which ones are not sales, why the summary opens a new block, and what it is warning you about when something does not add up. That can be checked against the file itself, which is why it is written here.
What is not reading but tax judgement — which obligations arise from holding stock in another country, where and when you have to register, and how each of those blocks is declared — is your tax adviser's work, with your case in front of them. A report read by country of departure, with the transfers kept out of the sales and the warnings attended to, is the best starting point you can hand them; it is not a substitute for their review.