FAQ – Updating VAT rates in WooCommerce

The EU VAT Assistant doesn’t update the rates up to automatically. This is by design. The plugin plugin can’t figure out what a tax class represent. For example, ebooks can be taxed at different rates in different countries, and a tax class doesn’t provide a way to determine which rate should be fetched for each country.

It’s also important to keep in mind that applying the correct VAT rate to each sale is up to the merchant. Updating the rates manually allows the merchant to double check that they are the correct ones. We can’t take responsibility for any compliance issue.

How to update the VAT rates
Keeping the rates up to date is a simple manual task. . For example, Germany lowered their tax rates from the 1 July 2020 until the 31 December 2020. Ireland is going to do something similar on the 1st of September (see https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-news/covid-19-vat-rate-changes.html). Updating the rates will be a matter of going to WooCommerce > Settings > Tax > “Tax Class”, changing the tax rate and saving the settings.

These changes are infrequent, therefore a simple reminder can be used to remember to update the rates. That’s the same approach we use internally.