Intra-Community turnover report to disappear in 2030: what will replace it?

Yes, the current consolidated intra-Community turnover report will disappear. However, the reporting obligation itself will not disappear, it will simply be faster. Council Directive (EU) 2025/516 repeals Articles 265–271 of the VAT Directive, on which the current periodic summary report (EC Sales List, in Estonia form VD) is based, as of 1 July 2030. The new wording replaces Articles 262–264: transaction-based digital reporting, where data is transferred for each transaction separately and immediately, rather than as a monthly summary. Member States must adopt and publish the necessary national rules by 30 June 2030 at the latest and apply them from 1 July 2030. For a taxable person, this means that the completion of a monthly report will be replaced by the transmission of data at the time of issuing the invoice. The directive does not provide for an exemption depending on the size of the company or its turnover.

The report disappears, the pace changes

ViDA (VAT in the Digital Age) is already a law, 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. However, the transition itself will not take place until 2030, and it is this time gap that gives rise to three common misunderstandings.

The first: „reporting ends.“ It doesn’t end. The form and rhythm end. Instead of the consolidated report, transaction-based data transmission will come.

Second: „there should be an exception for small businesses.“ There is no such exception in the directive.

Third: „we will start sending data directly to the European Commission portal.“ This is not the case either. The data goes to the tax authorities in your country, who forward it on.

Take a simple mental model: today you present a list at the end of the month, from 2030 each bill will speak for itself.

Who does this affect and will the turnover limit save us?

Two things trigger the obligation: You are registered for VAT and You carry out a certain type of cross-border transaction. The amount of turnover does not matter. The new Article 262 covers according to the directive all VAT taxable persons who make specified intra-Community supplies, transfers of goods, acquisitions and reverse charge transactions. There is no turnover-based threshold or general small business exemption.

There is one important difference, however. A Member State may decide not to require data from the buyer side for transactions under Article 262(1)(b) and (d). These are intra-Community acquisitions and reverse charge acquisitions. This choice does not concern the seller side: data must be provided for transactions under points (a) and (c), i.e. your own intra-Community supplies and reverse charge services. So if Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania uses this option, the purchase invoice side will be simpler, but the sales side will not.

How data moves from July 1, 2030

The chain is shorter than it looks on paper:

• Invoice: You issue a structured e-invoice, not a PDF invoice.
• Data transfer: The invoice data goes to the tax authorities in your country. As a seller, you do this when issuing the invoice, as a buyer (if the country requires it) after receiving the invoice.
• National system: The tax authority automatically transmits the collected data to the European Central Register.

You can do the data transfer yourself or have it done by a third party, such as a service provider, accountant, or operator. The directive obliges Member States allow transmission using the European e-invoicing standard and its listed syntaxes, as set out in Directive 2014/55/EU. Syntax here simply means the technical format of the data. The content is the same, but the „writing“ is different.

Will Peppol become mandatory?

The directive does not prescribe a single mandatory channel. The requirement is that the country must adopt a European standard and that the transmission can be done either by itself or through a partner. Peppol is the network through which a large part of the Baltic e-invoices already move today, and if your software sends machine-readable e-invoices according to the European standard, a large part of the work on the data content side has been done. The exact national choices of channels and interfaces will be clarified during the implementation phase. The Commission has published ViDA implementation work plan, on the basis of which the technical details are established.

Deadlines, data fields and tax risk

This is where the most changes happen. According to Directive 2025/516 The seller must provide information on each transaction when the invoice is issued or should have been issued. If the invoice is issued by the customer himself (self-billing), the deadline is no later than 5 days after issuance. If a Member State requires information on purchases from the buyer, this must be provided no later than 5 days after receipt of the invoice. As of 2030, invoices for intra-Community supplies of goods and for certain reverse charge supplies must be issued no later than the 15th day of the month following the month in which the chargeable event occurs.

The data that goes into the report comes from the invoice fields. Two fields are worth looking up today: a reference to the original invoice number in the case of corrections, and the seller's bank account or virtual account ID. If your software keeps the credit note separate from the original invoice or if the IBAN code is only in free text on the invoice, this must be fixed before 2030.

And now the part about money. The tax authorities may refuse the VAT exemption for intra-Community supplies of goods if the seller fails to provide the required information or provides it incorrectly, unless the seller can properly justify the omission. In practice: a 1,200-euro invoice to a Latvian customer, the details of which were not provided, is no longer just a formal error, but may become taxable turnover in Estonia.

Central VIES is not a portal where you report yourself.

Central VIES will launch on the same date, July 1, 2030. According to Council Regulation (EU) 2025/517 The central system is technically developed and managed by the European Commission, but each Member State must maintain a national electronic system that automatically forwards the collected data. For the entrepreneur, this means that the address remains at home: the data goes to their tax authority, not to Brussels.

What happens in the central register is a check and comparison. The Member State must transmit the data to Central VIES no later than one day after it is collected, and data on VAT payers and intra-Community transactions will be stored for 10 years. From 1 July 2032, the old VIES information exchange provisions will disappear, but the obligation to electronically confirm the validity of the VAT payer number and the associated name and address will remain. The check of the VAT number will not disappear. Rather, it will become even more important, because the wrong number will now be flagged at the transaction level.

What to present today in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

The current forms and deadlines are valid until June 30, 2030. Do not stop submitting earlier.

Country	Report	What is declared?	Deadline
Estonia	Form VD	Intra-Community supply of goods, triangular transactions, on-demand supplies and services supplied to a taxable person in another Member State	The 20th day of the month following the calendar month
Latvia	VAT return supplement (PVN 2 / "VAT 2")	ES supplies of goods and services to a VAT taxable person in another Member State	The exact name and deadline of the form must be checked in the VID instructions (not confirmed with the original sources here).
Lithuania	Form FR0564	Only for persons registered for VAT in other Member States goods supplied and services rendered; the value of goods purchased from other Member States is not shown	The submission deadline must be checked in the VMI guidelines (not confirmed with the original sources here)

Two practical nuances. In Estonia The report is not submitted if such supply of goods or services or delivery of goods to another Member State as a stock on demand has not taken place., and the report can be filled in manually in e-MTA, loaded from an XML or CSV file, or sent from accounting software via X-tee. In Lithuania, it must When correcting FR0564, resubmit the entire report., not just the data that changes. According to the VMI guidelines, a free-form explanation must be attached to the correction of supplies pursuant to Article 49 of the VAT Act, indicating the reasons for the correction.

Preparing for 2026–2030: What to Ask Your Software for

Four years seems like a long time, until it turns out that half of the list is about data quality, not software version.

• Map flows: Write down which of your sales and purchases are intra-Community supplies, acquisitions, triangular transactions or reverse charge services. These are the lines that will start to move transaction-based from 2030.
• Check VAT numbers systematically: The Lithuanian tax authority points out that the partner's VAT number can be checked On the European Commission website or via the i.MAS portal query and web service. Make it part of the invoice creation, not the end-of-quarter check.
• Move the props to the structure: If the country, VAT number, type of supply or tax exemption basis is in free text on the invoice, it is not possible to correctly read them from the machine-readable e-invoice.
• Keep the chain of corrections: The credit note and correction note must refer to the original invoice number.
• Set up a payment account: The seller's bank account or virtual account ID must be in a separate field.
• Ask the software provider one specific question: whether and how you plan to support national transaction-based data transfer from July 1, 2030, and whether invoices will be issued in European e-invoicing standard syntaxes. The answer „we are working on it“ is not yet a plan.

If you are already sending and receiving e-invoices in a structured format today, most of the work is done, and the change in 2030 is mainly about where and how quickly the data moves. If invoices move as PDFs and VD is filled out manually at the end of the month, this is the part of the work that will no longer work in four years.

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Last checked: 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.