Setting up the small business scheme (§ 19 German VAT Act)

Under the small business scheme (§ 19 German VAT Act) you do not charge VAT on your invoices. Instead, the document must carry a note pointing to the scheme. Univents handles both once you enable the setting in your company details.

One-time setup

1. Open Settings → Company.
2. Enable the Small business scheme (§ 19 UStG) switch.
3. Enter your tax number in the same section. As a small business you usually have no VAT identification number — the tax number is enough, and without one of the two you cannot send an invoice.
4. Save.

Careful: The business identification number issued by the Federal Central Tax Office is not your VAT identification number. Both start with DE and carry nine digits, but they mean different things. Putting the business identification number into the VAT ID field makes your invoice claim you are liable for VAT.

What changes afterwards

Every new quote and invoice is created without VAT from that point on:

• All line items sit at 0 percent — even when the article itself carries a different tax rate.
• The document's VAT total is 0.
• The document remembers the status. If you later move to standard taxation, your older invoices stay unchanged.

Existing documents are not touched. They keep the tax rates they were created with.

Handling a single document differently

In the invoice editor, the Invoice fields section holds a Small business scheme switch right next to reverse charge. It is pre-filled from your company settings.

Turning it on for a draft also moves the line items you already entered to 0 percent and recalculates the totals.

Turning it off leaves the line items at 0 percent. Univents does not guess a previous tax rate back, because not every line item was necessarily at 19 percent — set the correct rate on the affected line items yourself.

Note: The switch cannot be moved on an invoice that has already been issued. That is deliberate: an issued document has to stay unchanged. If you need a correction, cancel the invoice and issue a new one.

The required note on the document

The sentence "Gemäß § 19 UStG wird keine Umsatzsteuer berechnet." belongs on every document. It comes from your document layout. If you cannot see it on your documents yet, contact support — we will add it to your layout once.

If you exceed the turnover threshold

Once you pass the thresholds of the small business scheme, turn the switch in Settings → Company back off. New documents will then again use the tax rate from each article. Your existing invoices remain untouched.