A registered company cannot get paid. We close that gap
VAT and VIES, the OSS position decided before the first invoice rather than after, certified invoicing that will survive an inspection, the first employment contract, and permanent establishment risk checked before you hire anywhere else in Europe.
Incorporation is the easy part. Trading is where it stalls
Most people arrive here having solved the wrong problem. They have a registered company, a certificate and a tax number, and they cannot issue a valid invoice or receive a payment. These are the five things that sit between the two states, and none of them is on a formation checklist.
VAT, VIES and the OSS position
Registration follows your declared activity. We settle whether your supplies are taxable, exempt or outside scope, get you into VIES if you will sell to EU businesses, and decide the One Stop Shop position before the threshold decides it for you.
- Start of activity declared with the right VAT regime
- VIES enrolment so EU customers can validate you
- OSS registration where cross-border consumer sales justify it
- Reverse charge wording that your customers will accept
Invoicing that is actually valid
Portuguese invoices must come from software certified by the Autoridade Tributária and carry the ATCUD and a QR code. A document from a spreadsheet is not an invoice here, whatever it looks like.
- Certified invoicing software selected and configured
- Series registered and ATCUD obtained
- Monthly SAF-T export wired to your accountant
- Invoice templates that satisfy both Portuguese and EU rules
Your first hire, priced honestly
Employer contributions at 23.75% with no ceiling, fourteen salary payments a year, meal allowance and accident insurance. We model the real annual cost before you make an offer.
- Full-cost model before the offer letter goes out
- Contract drafted, not downloaded
- Social Security registration and payroll set up
- Probation, termination and notice understood in advance
Permanent establishment, checked first
The single largest unpriced risk in a European expansion. A salesperson in another member state can make that country tax part of your profit, whatever your Portuguese rate says.
- Exposure reviewed before the first foreign hire
- Who concludes contracts, decided deliberately
- Warehousing and stock positions assessed
- Corporate residence risk where management sits abroad
The threshold that is lower than you think
Ten thousand euros, counted across every member state together rather than country by country, annually. Cross it and you stop charging your Portuguese rate and start charging the customer’s national rate through the One Stop Shop. It is the most commonly crossed line in European e-commerce.
The reverse charge line carries a warning worth repeating. You must validate the customer’s VAT number in VIES before invoicing and keep the proof. If the number turns out to be invalid, the supply is treated as domestic and the VAT you did not charge comes out of your margin rather than the customer’s pocket.
From registered to paid, in order
The start of activity declaration fixes your CAE codes, your VAT regime and your filing frequency. It is quick to lodge and expensive to correct, and it is read by every bank that looks at you afterwards.
Not left to be discovered. Whether you need OSS depends on a forecast, and making that forecast badly is cheaper to fix now than to unwind two quarters of incorrect invoices later.
Software chosen and configured, series registered, ATCUD obtained, templates checked against both Portuguese and EU invoicing requirements. The SAF-T export wired straight to your accountant.
A payment institution opened in days so you can invoice and be paid immediately, while the Portuguese bank file runs in parallel. We have written separately about why that file takes as long as it does.
Your customer terms reviewed against Portuguese and EU consumer rules if you sell to consumers, and your supplier contracts checked for the clauses that matter when something goes wrong across a border.
Full cost modelled, contract drafted, Social Security registration, payroll running. And the permanent establishment question answered before anyone is hired outside Portugal.
You do not have to localise to be available
EU rules stop you blocking a customer in another member state or silently redirecting them to a local site. They do not require you to actively sell and deliver across borders. That distinction is worth money, and almost nobody uses it.
- Accept orders from every member state
- Support them in English
- Spend nothing on acquisition in those markets
- Watch where demand arrives unprompted
- Localise the market that actually shows up
- Terms reviewed under that country’s consumer law, not translated
- The payment methods people there actually use
- Support in the language of the sale
- Invoicing that satisfies local rules, which in Italy means the national exchange
- And the permanent establishment question, once you put a person there
The inbound trickle from being merely available is the cheapest market research there is, and it routinely contradicts the country ranking in the business plan. We would rather you localised the market that showed up than the one that looked biggest on a slide.
The EU VAT reform, and the dates that are now fixed
VAT in the Digital Age was adopted by the Council in March 2025. It is law, the dates are long, and nothing about it requires action from a company launching this quarter. We set it out because your systems choices now are easier if you know where this ends.
The One Stop Shop is extended and the scope for mandatory reverse charge widens, so that a business selling across the EU needs fewer foreign VAT registrations. For a Portuguese company selling into several member states this is the most useful part of the package.
Adopted 11 March 2025. Phased from 1 January 2027, with the main step on 1 July 2028.Structured electronic invoices become the rule for cross-border business-to-business and business-to-government supplies within the EU, with near-real-time reporting and a short window to issue the invoice after the chargeable event.
Directive (EU) 2025/516. National implementation due by mid-2030.Member states that already run their own e-invoicing or reporting systems bring them into line with the EU model. Portugal is one of the earliest adopters of this kind of infrastructure, which is why the SAF-T file already exists here and does not in many member states.
Target date 1 January 2035.The practical consequence for a launch today is narrow: choose invoicing software that is actively maintained and exports structured data, and do not buy anything on the basis of a 2030 deadline. We track the national implementing measures and will tell you when something needs doing.
Scoped to the launch, quoted before it starts
- Start of activity and CAE codes
- VAT regime and VIES enrolment
- Certified invoicing selected and configured
- Series registered and ATCUD obtained
- Payment institution opened
- Employment
- Cross-border analysis
- Everything in Commercial setup
- OSS position decided and registered if needed
- Customer terms reviewed for your markets
- First employment contract drafted
- Payroll and Social Security set up
- Permanent establishment review for your plan
- Bank file prepared and introductions made
- Several member states assessed together
- Local VAT registrations where OSS does not reach
- Permanent establishment opinion per market
- Group structure and withholding reviewed
- Trademark filed before launch
- Sequencing advice: which market, in what order
One-off fees for the launch work itself. Ongoing accounting is quoted separately and monthly. Software licences, payment institution charges and any foreign VAT registration fees are third-party costs passed through at cost.
The rules this sits on
- Código do IVA and the EU VAT Directive 2006/112/EC — the place-of-supply rules, the reverse charge for B2B services, and the One Stop Shop.
- The EUR 10,000 EU-wide threshold for cross-border supplies of goods and digital services to consumers, above which the customer’s national rate applies.
- Portuguese invoicing rules requiring certified software, registered document series, the ATCUD and a QR code on invoices.
- Regulation (EU) 2018/302 on unjustified geo-blocking — you may not block or silently redirect a customer from another member state, and you are not obliged to actively sell and deliver cross-border.
- Directive (EU) 2025/516, the VAT in the Digital Age package adopted on 11 March 2025, phasing single VAT registration and digital reporting to 2030 and convergence to 2035.
- Código do Trabalho and the Portuguese social security regime — employment contracts, the fourteen-payment year and employer contributions at 23.75%.
Position at October 2026. Adopted EU measures are shown with their phasing dates; national implementing measures follow and may add detail. Nothing here is advice on your specific supplies, and the VAT treatment of a particular transaction depends on facts this page cannot see.
Questions we answer every week
My company is registered. Why can I not just start invoicing?
Legally you can, once you have activity codes and certified invoicing software. Practically you need somewhere for the money to arrive, and a Portuguese bank account for a foreign-owned company takes weeks. The other thing people miss is that invoicing software in Portugal has to be certified by the tax authority and your invoices have to carry the ATCUD and a QR code. A generic invoice from a spreadsheet is not a valid Portuguese invoice, and your customer’s accountant will tell them so.
Do I have to register for VAT immediately?
Registration follows from your declared activity, which is settled at the start of activity declaration rather than later. The questions that matter are whether your supplies are taxable, exempt or outside scope, whether you will sell to businesses elsewhere in the EU and therefore need to be in VIES, and whether cross-border sales to consumers will pass the €10,000 threshold that pushes you into the customer’s national rate through OSS.
What is the €10,000 threshold and does it apply to me?
It is a single EU-wide threshold for cross-border sales of goods and digital services to consumers. Below it you may charge your own Portuguese rate. Above it, counted across all member states together rather than per country, you charge the rate of the customer’s country and account for it through the One Stop Shop. It is low, it is annual, and businesses cross it without noticing.
What does the first employee actually cost?
More than the salary by roughly a third. Employer social security is 23.75% of gross with no ceiling, and Portugal pays fourteen monthly salaries a year rather than twelve. On top sit a meal allowance, occupational accident insurance and the administration. We model the real annual figure before you make an offer, because the number on the offer letter is not the number in your budget.
Can I hire a salesperson in Germany or Spain under my Portuguese company?
You can, and this is where companies create tax liabilities they did not plan for. A person who habitually plays the principal role in concluding contracts in another country can create a permanent establishment there, which means that country taxes the profit attributable to it regardless of what your Portuguese rate is. We look at this before the first foreign hire rather than after it, because the facts are yours to arrange only while they are still in the future.
Do I need to translate my site and terms for every EU country?
Not to be available there, and yes to sell there properly. EU rules stop you blocking a customer in another member state or silently redirecting them, but they do not require you to actively sell and deliver across borders. That gives you a free middle position: accept orders from everywhere, support them in English, spend nothing on acquisition, and watch where demand arrives on its own before you localise.
How long from incorporation to a first paid invoice?
Two to four weeks for the commercial setup, which is VAT, activity codes, invoicing and the first contract. The variable is the bank. Most of our launch clients run a payment institution from week one so they can invoice and be paid while the Portuguese account is being opened, then switch the main flow across once it exists.
Tell us what you sell and where. You get a launch plan with dates
What the product or service is, whether you sell to businesses or consumers, which countries you expect revenue from in year one, and whether anyone will be employed. Within a working day you get the VAT position, the invoicing setup, the realistic date for a first compliant invoice, and a flag on anything in the plan that creates a tax presence you had not budgeted for.