Selling and buying goods inside and outside the EU: supplies, acquisitions, exports

A metalworking shop near Vicenza sells a 40,000 € press to a company in Lyon, invoices it without VAT and ships it. Months later it finds out that the buyer never gave it a French VAT number and that the sale never made it into the Intrastat return. The zero rating falls away: at the standard rate, 8,800 € of tax is missing, and the shop pays it out of its own pocket.

When a sale to another Member State carries no Italian VAT

Italian VAT applies to supplies of goods and services made in Italy by anyone running a business, a craft or a profession, and to imports. Once goods leave Italy for another EU country, that general rule is no longer enough: a separate set of rules has to decide where the tax is actually paid.

Those rules sit in Decree-Law 331 of 1993. Its article 41 lists the intra-community supplies that are not taxable in Italy. The first one, and by far the most common for a small business, is the sale for consideration of goods transported or dispatched to another Member State to a buyer who is a taxable person.

Transport can be arranged by the seller, by the buyer or by a third party acting for either of them; the text treats all three the same way. The goods may even be processed, transformed or adapted on the buyer's behalf before they leave, and the sale still keeps its intra-community character.

Zero-rated does not mean outside the VAT system. The sale remains a VAT transaction in every respect: it is invoiced, recorded and counted in the annual turnover. The only difference is that no Italian tax is charged, because the buyer will account for tax in its own country on the acquisition it makes there.

The buyer therefore has to be a business, or one of the bodies, associations and organisations that article 4 of the VAT decree treats like taxable persons. When the buyer is a private consumer, the sale follows a different route, distance selling, which is covered later in this module.

Article 41 also covers less common situations. Goods sent to another Member State to be installed or assembled there by the supplier are zero-rated too. Sending your own goods to another EU country for the needs of your business, and selling new means of transport, are treated as supplies as well.

One exclusion matters to many readers directly. Paragraph 2-bis states that supplies made by a business under the small-business exemption scheme are not intra-community supplies. A trader in that scheme cannot treat sales to other EU businesses as zero-rated intra-community supplies.

The two conditions: the buyer's number and the return

For years zero rating looked like an automatic consequence of the goods crossing a border. The text in force in 2026 makes it depend on two written conditions, set out in paragraph 2-ter of article 41. Ignoring them costs exactly what it cost the Vicenza workshop in the opening story.

The first condition concerns the buyer: it must have given the seller the VAT identification number issued by its own Member State. Knowing that the customer is a business is not enough. You need its number, and it is wise to check it before the goods are shipped rather than afterwards.

The second condition concerns the seller: it must have filed the recapitulative list required by article 50 of the same decree, that is, the Intrastat return for sales, or must have properly justified why that return is incomplete or missing. A filing that looks statistical becomes a substantive condition for the exemption.

• The buyer is a taxable person or an equivalent body established in another Member State
• The goods are transported or dispatched out of Italy to that State
• The buyer has given its VAT identification number
• The sale appears in the Intrastat return, or its absence is justified
• The seller is not in the small-business exemption scheme

The number the buyer gives you should be checked. The European Commission runs an online service for verifying EU VAT numbers, and the Italian Revenue Agency's page on the VIES database links to it. A check made when the order comes in, saved with its date, is the simplest evidence of care a seller can produce.

The seller has to be in order as well. To carry out intra-community transactions, an Italian VAT number must be included in the VIES database; otherwise it shows as invalid to the foreign buyer. The second module explains how you get into that database and why you can drop out of it without meaning to.

Invoicing and recording an intra-community supply

The invoice for an intra-community supply follows article 46 of Decree-Law 331. It must be issued by the 15th of the month after the month in which the supply took place. Instead of a tax amount, it states that the transaction is not taxable, optionally citing the EU or Italian provision that applies.

The invoice must also show the VAT identification number the buyer's Member State has issued to it. If the goods are delivered to a Member State other than the buyer's, the invoice must say so specifically. This is the same information you will need for the Intrastat return, so the two should match.

Recording follows article 47. Invoices for intra-community supplies are entered separately in the sales ledger, in numerical order and within the deadline for issuing them, and they are allocated to the month in which the supply took place. The period that counts is therefore the month of the sale, not the month of the invoice.

That leaves the question of the channel. A foreign buyer has no Italian electronic address, yet the invoice is still a document of the Italian business. Anyone who wants to see how these invoices are issued and transmitted can pair this course with the catalogue's page on electronic invoicing.

There is a special case worth knowing. When the goods are carried to the other State by the buyer, or by a haulier the buyer hires, the seller depends on the buyer for proof of arrival. The penalties law attaches a consequence to goods that do not reach their destination within a set time.

Under the latest version read of article 7 of Legislative Decree 471 of 1997, a seller zero-rating under article 41 is penalised if goods carried by the buyer have not reached the other State within ninety days of delivery. Correcting the invoice and paying the tax within the next thirty days avoids the penalty.

Buying from an EU supplier: self-accounting and recording

The mirror image is the intra-community acquisition. An Italian business buys goods from a supplier established in another Member State, which invoices without its own VAT. The tax does not disappear: it is due in Italy, and under article 17 of the VAT decree it is the buyer, not the foreign supplier, who pays it.

Article 17 says that for supplies made in Italy by non-residents to taxable persons established in Italy, the obligations fall on the buyer or customer. When the supplier is established in the EU, the buyer invoices and records under articles 46 and 47 of Decree-Law 331.

In practice the buyer takes the supplier's invoice and completes it. It numbers the invoice, adds the euro equivalent of the price and of any other elements of the taxable amount stated in a foreign currency, and adds the amount of tax worked out at the rate that applies to the goods bought.

If the acquisition is made without tax, is zero-rated or exempt, the buyer states the reason instead of a tax amount, optionally citing the EU or Italian provision. In the great majority of cases, though, completing the invoice produces real tax, at the rate those goods would carry if they were bought in Italy.

The completed invoice is entered twice. Article 47 requires it in the sales ledger by the 15th of the month after it was received, allocated to the previous month. To deduct the tax, it must also be entered separately in the purchase ledger. The same amount of tax therefore appears as a debit and as a credit.

For a business that deducts all the VAT on its purchases, the net effect is nil: the tax owed and the tax deducted cancel out in the same periodic return. It is not nil for a business with restricted deduction, for instance because it also makes exempt supplies. For that business, self-accounting becomes a real cost.

Sometimes the supplier's invoice never arrives. Article 46 then requires the buyer, if it has not received the invoice by the end of the second month after the transaction, to issue the invoice itself, as a single copy, by the 15th of the third month. This is a self-billed invoice, carrying the note required by article 21.

If instead the invoice arrives showing a price lower than the real one, the buyer must issue a supplementary invoice by the 15th of the month after recording the original. The idea is the same throughout: the tax due in Italy must match the real transaction, even when the supplier gets it wrong.

Exporting outside the EU

When goods leave the territory of the Union, the rules come from a different source. Export sales are governed by article 8 of the VAT decree, which makes them non-taxable. The logic resembles the intra-community one, since Italian tax does not follow goods consumed outside the Union, but the conditions and the proof are different.

The first case is an export handled by the seller, directly or through agents, with the goods shipped outside the Union at its own care or in its own name. The export must be shown by a customs document or by a customs endorsement. Without that document, the seller has no proof that the goods really left.

The second case is a sale to a non-resident buyer who takes the goods out of the Union itself. The goods must leave within ninety days of delivery, and the exit must be shown by a customs or post office endorsement. The risk of delay lands on the Italian seller.

In both cases the invoice carries, instead of the tax, the note «operazione non imponibile», which article 21 prescribes for transactions under articles 8, 8-bis and 9. It is the same wording used for an intra-community supply, but the legal basis differs, and the invoice should cite the right provision.

Exports have an effect that goes beyond the single invoice. A business that exports a lot builds up a VAT credit, because it pays tax on its purchases but charges none on its sales. That is why the law lets it, under certain conditions, buy without VAT. This is the regular exporter regime, which has its own course.

Selling to consumers in other Member States

A small workshop selling online to consumers in France or Germany is not making intra-community supplies in the sense seen so far, because its customers are not taxable persons. Article 41 deals with these sales in letter b), under the name of intra-community distance sales, and gives them a rule of their own.

In principle they are not taxable in Italy, since tax is due where the goods arrive. That rule does not apply to a seller established only in Italy whose total of such sales and certain services to foreign EU consumers stayed below a threshold last year, for as long as it stays below it this year.

Below the threshold, then, the small seller charges Italian VAT just as if the customer lived in Milan. It may nonetheless opt to apply the other State's tax. The option is reported in the return for the year in which it is exercised and stays in force until revoked, and in any case for at least two years.

Above the threshold, the tax is due in the consumer's State. How to account for it there is outside the scope of this course. What matters here is that a sale to a European consumer and a sale to a European business follow two separate rules, and that the buyer's VAT number is what tells them apart.

The caveat of the consolidated VAT code

One caveat applies to the whole course. In the Official Gazette, articles 41, 46 and 47 of Decree-Law 331 and articles 8, 17 and 21 of the VAT decree are shown as repealed by Legislative Decree 10 of 2026. Article 171 of that consolidated code provides that its rules apply from 1 January 2027.

The rules described here are therefore those of the last non-empty version of each article, which governs transactions carried out in 2026. The course does not anticipate the new numbering or any changes in the consolidated code: readers after that date should find the same rules in the new articles before relying on them.

The same care applies to penalties. The Official Gazette shows Legislative Decree 471 of 1997 as repealed by Legislative Decree 173 of 2024, as amended by Decree-Law 200 of 2025. The percentages quoted come from the last non-empty version of article 7; the date from which the new text applies was not read here.