Yes, you can request a refund of the VAT you have paid in France yourself. Nothing in the law requires you to outsource this: Directive 2008/9 gives every Dutch taxable person the right to submit a request directly to the French tax authorities via the Dutch Tax Administration portal. You do not need an intermediary for this.
The question is therefore not whether it is possible, but whether it makes sense in your situation. For a single hotel invoice of fifty euros, the time spent on portal work usually does not justify the amount. For a business that regularly buys fuel, stays overnight or exhibits at a trade fair in France, the same work can be worthwhile — precisely because it only yields results if you keep doing it, period after period.
What doing it yourself involves in practice
Submitting yourself means logging into the portal, entering invoices by cost category, checking the amounts against what France allows and submitting the request within the applicable deadline. This sounds manageable for one period, but repeats every quarter or year, and separately for each country if you have also incurred costs in Germany or Belgium. The French tax authorities have their own requirements for, for example, the readability of invoices and the substantiation per cost category; these requirements differ in some respects from what another Member State requires.
Those doing this for the first time often only discover when contacted by the French authorities how strict the review can be. This is not the fault of the business, but a characteristic of the system: each Member State assesses independently, in its own language, according to its own practice. An overview of what differs by country in this regard can be found in the knowledge base on the explanation per country and cost category.
Where doing it yourself becomes difficult
The challenge lies less in the submission itself than in keeping it up. Submitting one request is manageable; tracking multiple periods, multiple countries and the associated correspondence is where the time investment increases. A query from the French tax authorities about a missing attachment sometimes comes months after submission, and must still be answered within the set deadline. For a business owner doing this alongside daily operations, that is the moment when portal work begins to weigh heavily.
Add to this that the amounts involved are relatively modest per year — often a few hundred to just over a thousand euros — spread across loose invoices that are not always well organised. This makes it tempting to let it go after a few times, even though the right to a refund remains until the statutory expiry date.
Weighing doing it yourself against outsourcing
There is no hard threshold in euros or number of invoices at which doing it yourself stops being worthwhile; it varies by business. Getting an indication of your own situation helps make the choice concrete. With a few questions about how you travel on business you get an idea of the amount potentially at stake, and with it a basis for deciding whether the time spent on submitting yourself outweighs the proceeds.
Those who choose to outsource pay vatea.eu no subscription but a percentage of what is actually granted — never upfront and never if nothing comes in. How the submission, monitoring of the deadline and the payout work in detail is explained on the page where the information comes from.
What falls outside both doing it yourself and outsourcing
Even if you outsource the work, you remain responsible for matters that fall outside the refund procedure: VAT registration in France, tax planning, or an objection procedure if a request is rejected. For the latter, vatea.eu refers you to a VAT specialist; the platform is an executor and information source, not a tax adviser. Complex situations, such as mixed business-private use or cross-border structures, require that separate advice.
Would you first like to see whether your business involves an amount worth investigating further? Take the free quick scan or read the other topics in the knowledge base — without an account, and at no cost.