A coworking and events venue near Leuven, Belgium, spent a decade with the simplest VAT life imaginable: one building, one country, one VAT return. Meeting rooms, training days and networking evenings — all taxed in Belgium, all declared at home.
Then the business started travelling. The team took its paid leadership workshops to Amsterdam and Cologne, added a live-streamed edition for people who could not attend, and sold team packages to companies alongside individual early-bird tickets. Three foreign VAT questions appeared at once — and their Belgian accountant, excellent on Belgian VAT, could not answer any of them.
This case study is based on a real client situation. Names, locations and figures have been changed to protect confidentiality; the VAT analysis and the solution are as delivered.
The starting point: what they thought vs what the rules said
The venue’s assumption was the intuitive one, and the wrong one: we are a Belgian company invoicing from Belgium, so we charge Belgian VAT and declare it in Belgium. Four specific errors were built into that sentence:
- Belgian VAT on Dutch tickets. Admission to an event is taxed where the event takes place, so the Amsterdam tickets carried Dutch VAT, not Belgian. Read the rule in our guide to VAT on events in the EU.
- Corporate tickets invoiced without VAT. The team packages sold to German companies for the Cologne edition went out under reverse charge “because it is B2B” — but admission has no reverse charge. German VAT was due.
- The streaming edition treated as Belgian. Sold to consumers across Europe, live-streamed events are taxed where the viewer resides — a rule that changed on 1 January 2025.
- Foreign input VAT written off. The Cologne venue and AV supplier charged German VAT that nobody tried to recover; it was simply booked as cost.
The analysis: same event, several regimes
The first deliverable was not a registration — it was a map. Each revenue line was classified by format and customer type, because those two questions decide everything:
- Herent (home) room hire and local events → Belgian VAT, domestic return. Unchanged, and worth stating explicitly: room hire is connected to immovable property and stays where the building is.
- Amsterdam workshop, tickets to individuals → Dutch VAT, B2C admission → reportable through OSS.
- Cologne workshop, tickets to individuals → German VAT, B2C admission → OSS.
- Cologne workshop, team packages to companies → German VAT, B2B admission → German VAT registration required. OSS cannot take B2B.
- Live-streamed edition, consumers across the EU → each viewer’s country rate → OSS.
- Live-streamed edition, corporate buyers → general B2B rule → reverse charge, no VAT charged.
Two foreign countries, six revenue lines, four different treatments. Notably, the Netherlands needed no registration at all — the entire Dutch exposure was B2C and fitted inside OSS.
The solution hellotax implemented
- Union OSS registration in Belgium, covering all foreign B2C admission — physical and streamed — in one quarterly return, with the correct rate per country.
- A German VAT registration for the B2B team packages, plus the ongoing German filings. This also unlocked deduction of the German input VAT on venue hire and AV equipment directly in the German return, instead of writing it off.
- Ticketing fixed at source: the checkout now captures format (in-person or streamed), attendee country and whether the buyer is a business with a valid VAT number — the three inputs that determine the invoice. Rates are applied automatically rather than corrected at quarter end.
- Invoice templates per country and customer type, so every document carried the right VAT treatment and wording from the first sale.
- A rule of thumb for the team: before announcing an event abroad, answer two questions — where is it held, and will companies be buying? Everything else follows from those.
The outcome
- Correct VAT from the first ticket of both foreign editions — no back-dated registration, no penalties, no VAT paid out of margin that had been priced without it.
- One new registration instead of two. A naive reading (“we sell abroad, we register abroad”) would have meant registering in both the Netherlands and Germany. Correct analysis kept the Dutch side inside OSS.
- German input VAT recovered on venue and equipment costs, which offset a meaningful part of the compliance cost of the German registration.
- A repeatable process: when the venue added a fourth city the following year, the setup absorbed it without new advice — the two questions gave the answer.
What other venues and organisers should take from this
The pattern is common to every events business that grows beyond its own building. VAT does not follow your office; it follows your event, your viewer or your building, depending on what you are selling. And the single biggest trap is the intuition that B2B means no VAT — for admission, it means exactly the opposite: local VAT and, usually, a local registration.
If you are a trainer or course business rather than a venue, the same logic applies to your formats — we mapped them in VAT for training providers and course creators.
How hellotax helps
hellotax handles the whole chain for events businesses: analysis of which sale belongs where, OSS registration and quarterly returns, local VAT registrations and filings where B2B admission requires them, and recovery of foreign input VAT. Comparing providers? See our comparison of EU VAT compliance providers.
Taking an event abroad for the first time? Talk to us before the tickets go on sale — pricing and invoicing are far easier to set up right than to unwind.
The post Case Study: How a Belgian Coworking Venue Handled VAT for Paid Workshops Across the EU appeared first on Hellotax Blog.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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