Yes, you can claim VAT refunds from Germany yourself. Directive 2008/9 gives every entrepreneur established in the Netherlands the right to claim foreign VAT digitally, and this is done through one portal: that of the Dutch Tax Authority, which forwards your request to the German tax authority. No intermediary is needed to exercise this right.
Whether it is wise to do it yourself is a different question from whether you are allowed to. That depends on how many invoices come in per year, how well structured your records already are, and whether you want to spend time on something that only comes around once or twice a year. This article sets out the practical side: what doing it yourself concretely means, and where the boundary lies with outsourcing.
What doing it yourself means in practice
Submitting yourself means you log in to the Tax Authority portal, compile a request for each cost category and period, and attach the underlying invoices. For each expense you must determine which of the ten EU cost categories it falls under, and whether Germany actually grants that cost category — not every country treats representation costs or private vehicles the same way, for example. This assessment does not happen automatically; you look it up yourself in the requirements that apply per refund country.
This is followed by bundling into a request that meets the threshold amount, the submission itself, and monitoring the response deadline. Germany may ask additional questions or request documents, and these must be answered within the given deadline — otherwise your request will still stall. Anyone who wants to know more about this before they start can find the structure of the entire process explained at the page explaining how the information is compiled.
What skills and time it requires
The portal and the underlying German forms are not always available in Dutch, and correspondence in response to an additional question usually takes place in German. While this is not an insurmountable barrier in itself, it does require someone in the organization to take this on, usually the office manager or accountant, alongside their regular work.
The largest time investment is not in filling in the form itself, but in keeping the invoice flow organized throughout the year. If you only start looking for invoices from ten months back at the deadline, you often lose more time than the refund amount is worth. An indication of what can be claimed in your situation is provided by the calculator, which gives an estimate in a few questions, and that is a good starting point to determine whether doing it yourself is worth the effort.
When doing it yourself works well
With a small and predictable number of foreign expenses — for example a handful of fuel purchases and one annual trade show — self-submission is easy to manage. The amounts are clear, the cost categories do not change often, and it takes a few hours per year instead of an ongoing effort.
It works less well once multiple countries are involved, the invoice flow comes in via different employees, or records have not been kept consistently. Then classifying and assessing per country becomes a task that requires ongoing time, with the risk that a request is submitted late or incompletely and the refund is forfeited permanently on 1 October of the following year.
What outsourcing changes
A platform such as vatea.eu takes over the portal work: invoices are read and classified, assessed against what Germany allows, bundled into a request and submitted, with monitoring of the response deadline. You remain the owner of the refund right; we act on your behalf based on a power of attorney. What we do not do is provide tax advice on complex situations — we refer those to a VAT specialist — and we do not register VAT numbers or file returns in other countries.
The difference isn't about what's allowed, but about the time cost versus the attention required to sustain it yourself, period after period. An overview of all situations in which refunds apply is collected on the page that sets out value added tax recovery by situation, and how the success fee works in that context is explained on the page with the rates.
Would you like to first see whether it's worth your business's time to invest in this, or would you rather leave it to us? Take the free quick-scan or browse through the other topics in the knowledge base — without needing an account.