The EC Sales List Ends in 2030 — What Replaces It?

Yes — the recapitulative EC Sales List as you know it goes away. The reporting obligation doesn't: it just gets faster. Council Directive (EU) 2025/516 repeals Articles 265–271 of the VAT Directive from 1 July 2030. Those are the articles the current periodic list (the EC Sales List, form VD in Estonia) rests on. In their place come rewritten Articles 262–264: transaction-level digital reporting, where data moves per invoice and immediately, not as a monthly summary. Member States must adopt and publish the necessary national rules by 30 June 2030 and apply them from 1 July 2030. For a VAT-registered business, filling in a monthly return is replaced by sending data at the moment the invoice is issued. The directive provides no exemption based on company size or turnover.

The report disappears, the tempo changes

ViDA (VAT in the Digital Age), the EU's package for bringing VAT rules into the digital age, is law already, not a draft. Directive 2025/516 was adopted on 11 March 2025, published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 25 March 2025 and entered into force on 14 April 2025. The switch itself only happens in 2030 — and that gap is exactly where three misunderstandings grow.

First: "reporting ends." It doesn't. The form and the rhythm end. Instead of a summary list, you send data per transaction.

Second: "small companies will get an exemption." There is no such exemption in the directive.

Third: "we'll be sending data straight into a European Commission portal." Well, well. Data goes to your own national tax authority, which passes it on.

The simplest way to keep it in your head: today you file a list at the end of the month; from 2030 each invoice announces itself.

Who it hits, and whether a turnover limit saves you

Two things trigger the obligation: you're registered for VAT, and you make certain types of cross-border transactions. Turnover plays no part. New Article 262 covers, under the directive, under VAT-registered persons making the defined intra-Community supplies, transfers of goods, acquisitions and reverse-charge transactions. There's no turnover threshold and no general small-business relief there.

One distinction does matter, though. A Member State may decide not to require buyer-side data for transactions under Article 262(1)(b) and (d), meaning intra-Community acquisitions and reverse-charge acquisitions. That option doesn't touch the seller side: for points (a) and (c), meaning your own intra-Community supplies and reverse-charged services, the data has to be submitted regardless. So if Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania uses that option, your purchase-invoice side stays simpler. Your sales side doesn't.

How the data will move from 1 July 2030

The chain is shorter than it looks on paper:

• The invoice: you issue a structured e-invoice, not a PDF invoice.
• The transmission: the invoice data goes to your own national tax authority. As a seller you do it when the invoice is issued; as a buyer (where your country requires it) after you receive the invoice.
• The national system: the tax authority automatically forwards the collected data to the European central register.

You can transmit the data yourself or have a third party do it — a service provider, your accountant, or an e-invoice operator. The directive requires Member States to allow transmission using the European e-invoicing standard and the syntaxes listed under it, as set out in Directive 2014/55/EU. Syntax here just means the technical format the data is written in. Same content, different spelling.

Will Peppol become mandatory?

The directive does not prescribe one mandatory channel. What it requires is that the country adopts the European standard, and that transmission can be done either by you or through a partner. Peppol is the network a large share of Baltic e-invoices already travels through, and if your software sends machine-readable e-invoices according to the European standard, much of the work on the content side is already done. The exact national choices on channels and interfaces will be settled during implementation. The Commission has published a work program for implementing ViDA, which is the basis for pinning down the technical detail.

Deadlines, invoice fields and the tax risk

This is where most of the changes sit. Under Directive 2025/516, the seller must transmit data for each transaction at the time the invoice is issued, or at the time it should have been issued. Where the customer issues the invoice (self-billing, ie an invoice drawn up by the buyer), the deadline is no later than 5 days after issue. Where a Member State requires buyer-side data on acquisitions, that has to be submitted no later than 5 days after the invoice is received. As of 2030, an invoice for an intra-Community supply of goods and for the defined reverse-charge supplies must be issued by the 15th day of the month following the month in which the chargeable event occurs.

The data set that ends up in the report comes from your invoice fields. Two fields are worth digging out today: on corrections, the reference to the original invoice number, and the seller's bank account or virtual account identifier. If your software keeps credit notes detached from the original invoice, or if the IBAN sits on the invoice only as free text, fix that well before 2030.

And now the part that touches money. The VAT exemption for an intra-Community supply of goods can be refused by the tax authority if the seller fails to submit the required data or submits it incorrectly, unless the seller can duly justify the shortcoming. In practice: a €1,200 invoice to a Latvian client whose data never got transmitted is no longer just a formal slip. It can turn into taxable turnover in Estonia.

Central VIES isn't a portal you report into

Central VIES starts on the same date, 1 July 2030. Under Council Regulation (EU) 2025/517, the European Commission develops and technically maintains the central system, while each Member State must run a national electronic system that forwards the collected data automatically. For a business, that means the address stays local: data goes to your own tax authority, not to Brussels.

What happens in the central register is checking and matching. A Member State must transmit the data to Central VIES no later than one day after collecting it, and data on VAT-registered persons and intra-Community transactions is kept for 10 years. From 1 July 2032 the old VIES information-exchange provisions fall away, but the obligation to confirm electronically the validity of a VAT identification number and the associated name and address remains. VAT number checking isn't going anywhere. If anything it matters more, because a wrong number now surfaces at the transaction level.

What you still file today in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

Until 30 June 2030 the existing forms and deadlines apply. Don't stop filing early.

Country	Report	What's declared?	Deadline
Estonia	Form VD	Intra-Community supplies of goods, triangular transactions, call-off stock, and services supplied to a taxable person in another Member State	The 20th day of the month following the calendar month
Latvia	Annex to the VAT return (PVN 2 / “VAT 2”)	EU supplies of goods and services to a VAT-registered person in another Member State	The exact form name and deadline need checking against VID guidance (not confirmed by the primary sources used here)
Lithuania	Form FR0564	Only goods supplied and services provided to persons registered for VAT in other Member States; the value of goods acquired from other Member States is not shown	The filing deadline needs checking against VMI guidance (not confirmed by the primary sources used here)

Two practical details. In Estonia, the report isn't filed if no such supply of goods or services, and no transfer of goods to another Member State as call-off stock, has taken place. The report can be filled in manually in e-MTA, loaded from an XML or CSV file, or sent from your accounting software over X-Road. In Lithuania, correcting FR0564 means re-filing the whole report, not only the figures that change. For corrections to supplies under Article 49 of the VAT law, VMI guidance says a free-form explanation setting out the reasons for the correction must be attached.

Getting ready, 2026–2030: the one question to ask your software provider

Four years sounds like plenty, until you notice that half the list is about data quality rather than a software version.

• Map your flows: write out which of your sales and purchases are intra-Community supplies, acquisitions, triangular transactions or reverse-charged services. Those are precisely the lines that start moving transaction by transaction in 2030.
• Check VAT numbers systematically: the Lithuanian tax authority points out that a partner's VAT identification number can be verified on the European Commission's website or through the i.MAS portal query and web service. Make it part of creating the invoice, not a quarter-end review.
• Move the details into structured fields: if country, VAT number, supply type or the grounds for exemption sit on the invoice as free text, they cannot be read out of a machine-readable e-invoice correctly.
• Keep the correction chain intact: credit notes and corrective invoices must refer to the original invoice number.
• Sort out the payment account: the seller's bank account or virtual account identifier belongs in its own field.
• Ask your software provider one concrete question: will you support national transaction-level data transmission from 1 July 2030, and how? And will invoices be issued in the syntaxes of the European e-invoicing standard? "We're working on it" isn't a plan yet.

If you already send and receive e-invoices in structured form, most of the work is behind you, and the 2030 change is mainly about where the data goes and how fast. If invoices move as PDFs and the VD gets filled in by hand at month end, that's the exact piece of work that stops functioning four years from now.

Also available in: in Estonian · Lithuanian

Last reviewed: September 14, 2026

FAQ

Will intra-Community turnover reporting disappear completely on 1 July 2030?

The reporting obligation will not disappear, but will become faster and transaction-based. Instead of submitting a monthly summary report (form VD), data will be automatically transmitted to the tax authorities upon issuance of each invoice.

Are small businesses exempt from ViDA digital reporting?

Directive (EU) 2025/516 does not provide for a turnover-based threshold or an exemption for small enterprises. The rules apply to all VAT taxable persons carrying out cross-border intra-Community transactions.

Where and how will the entrepreneur send transaction data from 2030?

The entrepreneur does not send the data to the European Commission portal, but to the tax authority in their country via a standard e-invoice. The tax authority automatically transmits the collected data to the Central VIES register.