Reduction of German VAT rate between 1st July 2020 and 31st December 2020
The German government coalition decided to moderate the economic effect of the Corona pandemic by reducing the German VAT rate from 1st July 2020 until 31st December 2020 (from to 19% to 16%).
This affects freight costs and transportation services, too.
If you are planning to use new resp. deviant tax indicators to supply the reduced tax rate in SAP, GPC recommends defining the corresponding tax conditions upfront: You may copy existing (tax) condition records (e.g. via mass maintenance for conditions) using the corresponding validity period and the appropriate tax indicator. Using a validity period from 1st July 2020 to 31st December 2020 will ensure, that any shipment before or after this period (considering freight calculation date) will use the actually used tax conditions.
In addition to tax indicator(s) used for ‘national services’ you may also have to consider tax indicator(s) assigned to the reverse charge mechanism (for carriers located in the European Union).
If your tax determination is already based on condition fields ‘Country in EU’, there should usually only be a maximum of three tax conditions to be considered/copied.
Otherwise – especially using tax conditions per country and/or carrier – there may be a major maintenance effort. In this case, you should check, whether a general change of the tax determination may be the better solution.
GPC strictly recommends creating additional, temporarily valid tax conditions instead of changing the tax indicator in the existing tax conditions!
Even changing the tax indicator on the effective date will not ensure that subsequent changes to freight results will use the correct tax indicator as the indicator of the corresponding tax condition changed in the meantime.