Digits for Craft CMS
EU VAT and invoicing
Digits Pro, and off until you switch it on.
What this does, and what it deliberately does not
Digits determines and documents VAT. It does not charge it.
Commerce's tax engine decides what a customer pays. Quietly restating that number on the invoice is how a shop ends up with books that do not reconcile and an accountant who trusts neither figure.
So Digits works out what the treatment should be under the place-of-supply rules, prints it with the wording the directive requires, records what Commerce actually took beside it, and puts the invoices where the two disagree on one screen for somebody to look at.
If you need Commerce to charge a different rate, that is a tax rule in Commerce. Digits will tell you that you need one.
The four treatments
Electronically supplied services — which a digital download is:
| Buyer | VAT number | Treatment | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own country | — | Domestic | your country's |
| Elsewhere in the EU | none, or unconfirmed | Customer's country (OSS) | the customer's |
| Elsewhere in the EU | confirmed | Reverse charge | 0%, with the required wording |
| Outside the EU | — | Outside the scope | 0% |
Why a VAT number's source is recorded
A number that passes a format check is a number that is not a typo.
A number VIES confirmed is a number the European Commission says belongs to a registered trader today.
Only the second is evidence for zero-rating a sale, and an invoice that does not record which of the two it had cannot be defended three years later. Digits stores both, prints the difference, and will not claim the reverse charge on a format check alone — a human has to confirm the number, or VIES has to.
VIES is opt-in
Checking against VIES is an outbound request to the Commission's service during somebody's checkout, and that service is frequently down. So it is off by default, the timeout is short, and a failure falls back to the format answer rather than throwing — a customer must not be unable to buy because Brussels is having an afternoon.
An answer is cached for 90 days by default. A number confirmed by hand never goes stale, because somebody looked at it on purpose.
Where the number comes from: organizationTaxId on the billing address — Craft's own field for
exactly this, so you get a VAT box in your checkout by enabling an address field rather than by
installing anything. A custom vatId field on the address is honoured too.
Evidence
The place-of-supply rules want two non-contradictory pieces of evidence for where a consumer is. Digits can offer the billing country and, where your CDN sets a country header, the country the request came from.
It will not do a geo-IP lookup of its own — that is an outbound request on every checkout and a database to keep current. When it has only one piece, the invoice says it had one piece rather than implying otherwise, and when the two disagree the invoice is flagged.
Set the header name under Settings → Invoicing. Cloudflare's is CF-IPCountry.
Rates
Installing seeds the 27 EU standard rates with an effective date, and the VAT screen tells you when they were seeded. Confirm them before your first return — they change by legislation, not by plugin release.
Rates are dated, not current. Add a row with a start date rather than editing the old one: an invoice raised in March has to keep March's rate after April's takes effect, including when it is reprinted next year for an auditor.
Numbering
An invoice number has to be sequential and gapless within its series, which is a stronger promise than unique. Digits allocates from a counter row, under a named lock, at the moment the document is written.
The counter is bucketed by reset period — never, yearly or monthly — so "restart every year" means something.
Numbers are unique across the whole install, not merely within a series, because that is what an
invoice number has to be. If you run more than one series, put {series} in the format; if you
forget, Digits bumps the counter past the collision rather than raising a duplicate.
Set Start at to carry on from the numbers you were already using.
Snapshots, and why nothing edits an invoice
Everything printed on an invoice is copied on to it at issue time — the addresses, the lines, every figure. The order will go on changing afterwards, and none of that may reach a document somebody has already filed with their return.
A mistake is corrected with a credit note: its own number in the same series, every figure negated, and a pointer back to what it corrects. That is what the rules require and the only version of events that survives an audit. Nothing in Digits edits or deletes an issued invoice.
Partial credits are proportional — credit €60 of a €120 invoice and the VAT is halved with it.
The OSS return
Digits → Invoices → VAT return defaults to the quarter that has just ended, because the only reason anybody opens that screen is that a return is due.
One row per country and rate, which is the shape the return asks for, downloadable as a CSV. Reverse charges and out-of-scope sales are excluded from the totals and listed separately below: they belong on the return as a different figure, and leaving them in overstates the liability.
From the console, for a cron job:
php craft digits/invoices/report 2026-04-01 2026-07-01
Turning it on for a shop that has been selling for a while
php craft digits/invoices/backfill --dry-run
php craft digits/invoices/backfill 2026-01-01
--dry-run prints the treatment, rate and net for every order that would get a document, without
writing anything. Run it first: it is also the fastest way to find out that your seller country is
not set.
What Digits does not do
- It does not calculate or collect tax at checkout.
- It does not file anything with anybody.
- It does not handle the Import One-Stop Shop, distance selling of goods, or thresholds — Digits sells files.
- It has no opinion about whether your shop is registered where it should be.