ViDA: What the EU VAT in the Digital Age Reform Means for Belgian Businesses

ViDA is a fancy name for one practical idea: the EU is moving every B2B invoice in the bloc onto the same digital rails Belgium already adopted. If you run a Belgian business, you got there first. ViDA is what catches everyone else up — and then asks a little more of you.

You only need to remember three dates and three changes.

What actually changes for you

By 2030 — cross-border invoices go digital. Today, when you invoice a German or French customer, a PDF email is fine. From July 2030, that PDF is no longer compliant. You will send a structured electronic invoice — exactly the kind you are already sending domestically through Peppol since January 2026. Same format. Different destination.

By 2030 — platforms become tax collectors. If you rent on Airbnb or drive for Bolt and you are under the VAT registration threshold today, you escape VAT. From January 2030, Airbnb and Bolt themselves will charge VAT on the gross booking and pay it to the tax authority. You will receive the net, not the gross. The arbitrage between informal hosts and registered hotels closes.

By 2028 — one VAT number is enough. If you ship your own products from your Belgian warehouse to a fulfilment centre in Germany today, you need a German VAT number for that move. From July 2028, the OSS (One Stop Shop) covers it. One Belgian registration, one quarterly OSS return — done.

What this means in practice

If you are already using a Peppol-capable invoicing tool for the Belgian mandate, you are ahead of every business in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The same rails carry your cross-border invoices when ViDA arrives.

If you host on Airbnb, factor in that your net payouts will drop when Airbnb starts withholding VAT. That happens by 1 January 2030 at the latest, possibly from 1 July 2028 if Belgium opts in early. Re-price now if your margin is thin.

If you sell physical goods into other EU countries, consolidate your existing foreign VAT registrations toward OSS. Less paperwork, fewer foreign accountants, one return.

What does not change

• Domestic B2C is not affected by ViDA's e-invoicing pillar. Selling to consumers in Belgium still works the way it does today.
• The €25,000 Belgian SME exemption threshold is unchanged by ViDA.
• Your Belgian VAT return rhythm (monthly or quarterly) is unchanged. The data flowing into it changes; the cadence does not.

The honest summary

ViDA is not a Belgian tax. It is a European framework that Belgium will translate into local law over the next four years. Most of the work is already done in your favour, because Peppol — which you adopted for the 2026 mandate — is the same standard ViDA picks. The two real risks are: (1) keeping Airbnb/Bolt economics intact under the deemed-supplier rule, and (2) not waiting until July 2030 to realise your cross-border PDFs stopped being valid.

Plan once. Re-plan in 2028. Be done.

ViDA was adopted by the Council on 11 March 2025 as Directive 2025/516 amending Directive 2006/112/EC, alongside Regulation 2025/517 and Implementing Regulation 2025/518. It is structured in three pillars with staggered application dates. Belgium's national B2B e-invoicing mandate (Act of 6 February 2024 and the related programme law) is not derogated by ViDA — both apply concurrently until 2035, when national pre-existing systems must align with the harmonised EU framework.

Pillar 1 — Digital Reporting Requirements (Article 218 et seq. revised)

Effective 1 July 2030 (cross-border B2B).

• Mandatory structured electronic invoicing for intra-Community supplies and acquisitions of goods and services between taxable persons. Format: any structured XML compliant with EN 16931 (Peppol BIS 3.0, UBL, CII).
• Issuance deadline tightened to 10 days after the chargeable event (Art. 222 revised). Summary invoices restricted.
• Recapitulative statements (current Vak 46 / Vak 48 in the Belgian VAT return — Form 723) are abolished for covered transactions and replaced by transaction-level digital reporting transmitted within 10 days of issue to the Member State of identification.
• Acquirer-side reporting is also required, creating a four-way data match: supplier issue → supplier MS report → acquirer MS report → cross-MS cross-check.

Belgian interaction: Belgium's own near-real-time e-reporting is not yet law. On 18 July 2026 the Council of Ministers approved a pre-draft law (voorontwerp van wet / avant-projet de loi), on a proposal by Finance Minister Jan Jambon, amending the VAT Code to introduce an electronic reporting obligation and to abolish the annual list of taxable customers for the businesses it covers. The pre-draft is with the Data Protection Authority and the Council of State for advice; it has not been tabled in the Chamber and nothing has been published in the Belgisch Staatsblad. The planned start date is 1 January 2028 — a government target, not a date fixed by any text in force. The ITAA expects the law in autumn 2026 and the implementing Royal Decree in early 2027; the VAT Code article numbers the pre-draft inserts are not public until the bill is tabled, so there is no article to cite yet.

As currently designed, both the supplier and the customer would report a subset of the mandatory invoice data to the administration in near real time within five days, over the same Peppol network already used for e-invoicing — the four-corner network plus the tax administration as a fifth corner — using the ViDA Tax Data Document dataset, for domestic B2B transactions. Supplies exempt under Article 44 of the VAT Code stay out of scope, and mixed invoices are reported for their taxable lines only. Those operational details come from the ITAA's description of the design, not from a published legal text, and can still change in the Council of State and parliamentary phase. Practically, Belgian businesses configuring Peppol for the 2026 domestic mandate are configuring the same rails — the ones ViDA will require cross-border in 2030, and the ones Belgian e-reporting would run on if and when it is voted. No second integration is required: the Belgian domestic mandate and ViDA's cross-border reporting both ride Peppol BIS Billing 3.0. What does need checking is your Peppol address. The Belgian Peppol Authority (FPS BOSA) imposes one national rule — a Belgian participant must be registered on Peppol under its enterprise number, ISO 6523 scheme 0208 (KBO/BCE). A registration under scheme 9925 (Belgian VAT number) is permitted alongside it, never instead of it.

Pillar 2 — Platform Economy (Article 28a, 242a revised)

Effective 1 January 2030 (Member States may opt in from 1 July 2028).

Deemed supplier rule extends to platforms that facilitate:

• Short-term accommodation rental (≤ 30 consecutive nights to the same person).
• Passenger transport by road.

The platform is deemed to receive and supply the service for VAT purposes where:

1. The underlying supplier has not provided a VAT identification number, or
2. The underlying supplier has declared that no VAT will be charged on the supply.

The Member State of taxation is, by default, the place of consumption (rental location / departure point), subject to the SME exemption rules. Each Member State may opt in to apply the rule from 1 July 2028; obliged date is 1 January 2030.

Consequences for Belgium-based hosts/drivers:

• A host under the SME threshold (€25,000 annual turnover, post the 2025 reform) keeps the exemption on its own declarations, but the platform charges VAT on the gross booking and remits it. The host receives the net.
• "Bundling" between Airbnb / Booking and platform invoices for cleaning, breakfast, parking gets re-examined: place-of-supply rules for ancillary services follow the deemed-supplier characterisation.

Pillar 3 — Single VAT Registration (Title XII, Chapter 6 revised)

Effective 1 July 2028.

• OSS extension: the Union scheme now covers own-goods movements between Member States (call-off stock simplification is abolished — Art. 17a deleted on the same date).
• Mandatory domestic reverse charge (Art. 194 revised): where a B2B supply of goods or services takes place in a Member State in which the supplier is not established and not identified, the customer must self-account.
• IOSS use for low-value goods (€150 threshold) becomes more attractive; some MS may make it mandatory for the supplier.

Belgian practical impact: a BE company shipping its own stock to a Dutch fulfilment centre no longer needs an NL VAT number for that movement (use OSS). Conversely, when receiving services from a non-established supplier, the Belgian acquirer's reverse-charge obligation in Vak 87 / 56 / 59 widens.

The Belgian filing-mechanics checklist

1. Today (May 2026) — confirm two things with your access point. First, that you send and receive Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 (customization urn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:3.0, process urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:01:1.0) — the format the 2026 domestic mandate runs on and the one ViDA will extend cross-border; there is no separate Belgian invoice format. Second, that your own company is registered on Peppol under 0208 plus your 10-digit enterprise number, and that any legacy 9925 (BE:VAT) registration left behind by a former provider either points at your current access point or has been removed. For a new Belgian customer, confirm their identifier rather than assume it: take the enterprise number from KBO/BCE Public Search and resolve it at lookup.peppol.org with a search string of the form 0208:0308357159.
2. By Jan 2028 (planned) — be ready for Belgian e-reporting if the pre-draft law is voted on the announced timetable (transaction-level data flow to the FOD), already aligned with ViDA semantics.
3. By Jul 2030 — abolish reliance on Vak 46 / 48 recapitulative listings for ViDA-covered transactions; route intra-EU B2B through DRR transactional reporting.
4. By Jan 2035 — confirm that any pre-existing Belgian-specific extension to invoicing format has been migrated to the harmonised ViDA standard.

Fines under the Belgian mandate already begin at €1,500 for a first offence and escalate. ViDA-level non-compliance penalties will be defined per Member State; Belgium's tradition is escalation by repetition and audit weighting.