How to Register For VAT in Germany as a Foreign Company or Self-Employed

If you want to store goods on German soil, you will need to register for VAT in Germany, no matter whether you sell in the country or not.

There are many other reasons to register but the topic of this article is “how to do it”.

As usual, the information about this on the Internet is scarce of clickbaity, written by tax offices that want to charge you €500 (or more) to do it for you.

There’s no need to pay, I explain how to do it below.

1. Figure Out Which Tax Office to Register with

As a federal country, Germany has several “Finanzamt”, which means tax offices.

Companies or self-employed located in Belgium, for example, need to register at the Finanzamt of Trier.

Use Perplexity or any other AI search engine to figure out which Finanzamt you should register with based on where your headquarters are located.

2. Fill up the Paper Work

I wrote to my Finanzamt and asked them which forms I had to fill in.

They provided a URL with several form. The one I had to fill in was named “Fragebogen zur umsatzsteuerlichen Erfassung von im Ausland ansässigen Unternehmern” (bless you).

They told me to fill it up and “send it back to them” but I actually had to send that through the Elster portal (more on that below), not to them directly.

You can find the forms here: https://www.formulare-bfinv.de/ffw/catalog/openFolder.do?path=catalog%3A%2F%2FUnternehmen%2Fust%2Fust-frag.

I suggest you fill it up with ChatGPT. Don’t forget to fill up any adjacent forms if needed. You will figure this out as you fill up the main form.

In my case (self-employed located in Belgium), I filled up two forms (034806, 034809).

3. Fill Up the Questionnaire on Elster and Send the Form

Once you’ve filled up the form above, you’ll be able to fill up the questionnaire on Elster and send the form through Elster.

Elster is the platform through which you do your tax work in Germany.

1. Register on elster.de
2. Go to “my forms”: https://www.elster.de/eportal/meineformulare
3. Click on “start new forms”.
4. Select the correct form.
5. Fill it up
6. Join the form(s) you filled in the section above “fill up the paperwork”.
7. Send to the correct “Finanzamt”.
8. Wait for a month.

There are several things to keep in mind.

1. How to choose which form to fill up: that depends on your situation. I registered for VAT as a self-employed person in Belgium. The form is different than if you register as a company. Ask a professional, or better, ask ChatGPT.
2. Not everything is translated on Elster. I filled up the entire questionnaire with ChatGPT in German and it understood reasonably well. Don’t fill up the form by yourself if you have no knowledge or experience. Ask a professional, or ask AI.
3. When you fill up the questionnaire, you might figure out that you may need to add an additional questionnaire to fill up. Don’t forget that.

That’s about it.

Conclusion

I figured out all this by talking to the tax office in Trier and using the deepsearch function of Grok. I sent the form two weeks ago and haven’t yet heard back from them, but fingers crossed.

Hopefully, this article will be enough for you to manage to register for VAT in Germany as a foreign company or a self-employed person.

If not, I suggest you use ChatGPT or Grok to figure it out, or write to your “Finanzamt”. Make sure you write in German as they do not speak English.

Good luck!