The tax rate to be applied is based on the date on which the service is provided - the invoice date is irrelevant. For license invoices, the date of delivery of the license key is therefore decisive, for services, the period within which the services were provided. In the case of contracts for continuous services, such as our software service contracts, the date of performance is the end date of the respective contract billing period (paragraph 3.3.1 RZ 24 of the BMF letter). This results in the necessity of subsequent invoice correction.

In accordance with the exception for the B2B sector (paragraph 3.12 of the BMF letter), invoices whose accounting period ends before 01.08.2020 remain valid and do not need to be corrected. Therefore, in the coming weeks and months we will credit all software service contracts whose billing period ends between 01.08. and 31.12.2020 and recalculate them with 16% VAT.

You can download the BMF letter here:

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