Online handicraft store. How to handle accounting when customers buy from Poland and abroad?

Online sales of handicrafts from Bolesławiec are increasingly reaching foreign markets

Local ceramics have been conquering not only the local but also foreign markets for years. Bolesławiec plants have sold their products, among other places, in Germany, France, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Australia, while interest in ceramics from the region in Japan has even resulted in separate publications and events.

The internet has significantly lowered the barrier to entering this type of sales. Today, foreign customers can be acquired by both a large manufacturer and a small workshop offering several dozen products in its own store or on a marketplace. Earlier this year, our editorial team described an online store as one of the sales channels for original Bolesławiec ceramics.

However, even the first order from outside Poland requires determining how the transaction should be settled. The store system itself will record the sale and payment, but it will not decide for the entrepreneur which VAT rules should apply.

Accounting for an online store selling in Poland and abroad

For accounting, the key information is not the mere fact that the purchase was made online. What matters above all is the buyer’s status, the country to which the goods are being sent and the place from which the shipment begins.

For a Polish workshop shipping products from Bolesławiec, the basic variants may look as follows:

It is particularly important to correctly determine whether the foreign recipient is a consumer or a business. For consumer sales within the EU, provisions concerning intra-Community distance sales of goods, or WSTO, may apply. A sale to a business with the appropriate VAT status may instead be settled as an intra-Community supply, or WDT, if the required conditions are met, including those concerning documentation of the goods’ dispatch to another Member State.

The data collected when an order is placed therefore also matters later, when taxes are settled. The country of delivery and the buyer’s status should be clearly identifiable from the sales documentation.

WSTO and VAT OSS in an online store – the PLN 42,000 threshold

For a small online store, the threshold of EUR 10,000, or PLN 42,000 is particularly important. It applies collectively to certain cross-border B2C transactions, including WSTO. If the statutory conditions are met, sales below this threshold may be taxed in Poland. Once it is exceeded, the place of taxation for WSTO is generally the country to which the goods are sent.

A workshop shipping ceramics to individual customers in Germany, Czechia and France should therefore monitor the total value of sales covered by the threshold, rather than a separate threshold for each country.

When settling VAT in the countries of consumption, the VAT OSS scheme can be used. It allows an entrepreneur to settle qualifying sales to consumers in different EU countries through a single point of contact, instead of registering for VAT separately in each country. The return must nevertheless correctly allocate sales to the individual countries and apply the tax rates in force there.

The store should therefore retain data that makes it possible to determine the consumer’s country, the transaction value and the method of settlement. With several dozen orders per month, manually searching for this information quickly becomes impractical.

Online payments, commissions and payment-operator settlements

The sales report and bank statement very often show different amounts. This is normal if a payment operator or marketplace deducts commissions, processes refunds or charges other fees along the way.

If the store sold products for PLN 10,000 and PLN 9,100 reached the entrepreneur’s account, accounting must still correctly report the sale and settle the deducted costs separately. The operator’s transfer alone is not enough to determine the revenue value.

Sales reports, fee summaries, refund information and commission documents are therefore necessary. This is particularly important when one payment from an operator covers transactions from several days or settles sales together with corrections from an earlier period.

Fees charged by foreign platforms, advertising systems or internet-service providers also require separate review. If the service is provided by a foreign entity, an obligation to settle the import of services may arise. In certain cases, the entrepreneur should also register as a VAT-UE taxpayer. This also applies to some businesses benefiting from VAT exemption.

Exports outside the European Union – how to settle online sales

When goods are shipped outside the European Union, customs documents have a direct bearing on tax settlement. Applying the 0% VAT rate on exports requires documentation confirming that the goods were removed from the EU territory.

For regular shipments to the USA, the United Kingdom or other non-EU countries, it is worth establishing one method for archiving such documents. This allows accounting to immediately link a specific sale with proof of export.

The absence of a document often becomes apparent only when the month is settled. The sale is closed in the store system, the customer has received the parcel and the money has arrived, but accounting still needs confirmation allowing the correct VAT rate to be applied. With a dozen or several dozen foreign parcels, searching for such documents several weeks later becomes an unnecessary additional obligation.

What documents should be forwarded from an online store to accounting?

With a few orders per month, data can still be checked individually. With higher sales, it is much better to establish a fixed set of reports and documents to be forwarded to accounting.

It most often includes:

• sales report from the online store,
• sales reports from marketplaces,
• payment-operator payout summaries,
• invoices for platform commissions and other fees,
• information about canceled orders and returns,
• invoices for online advertising and services from foreign providers,
• documents concerning shipments outside the EU,
• a summary of sales to consumers in individual EU countries,
• documents concerning sales in foreign currencies.

Well-prepared reports make it possible to quickly explain differences between order values in the store, amounts paid out by payment operators and documents recorded in the accounts. Without them, every discrepancy must be checked separately.

Online accounting office for an online store

In e-commerce, most accounting data is digital from the outset. Orders are recorded in the store system, payments with the operator, cost invoices arrive by email and the marketplace allows a report for a selected period to be downloaded. Cooperation with an online accounting office makes it possible to build a document workflow around these sources instead of printing data that is already stored in electronic systems.

The article’s substantive partner is the accounting office iKsięgowa.pl, which provides online accounting services to entrepreneurs. For an online store, it is particularly important to establish data-transfer procedures before regular international sales begin. As explained by accounting expert Iwona Sikorska from the iKsięgowa accounting office:

“A common problem in online stores occurs when an entrepreneur treats a transfer from a marketplace as the value of their sales. The platform may pay out an amount already reduced by commission, refunds or other fees, while accounting must show sales revenue separately and settle the costs charged by the operator separately. Sales in euros also involve exchange rates, and if the commission is invoiced by a foreign company, the import of services may arise. That is why, in larger e-commerce operations, accounting should work primarily with transaction reports rather than trying to reconstruct sales based solely on account inflows”..

It is also important for the entrepreneur to be able to consult an accountant before changing the sales model. Launching shipments to additional countries, entering a foreign marketplace or exceeding the WSTO threshold may have tax consequences before a significantly higher turnover appears in the bank account.

International e-commerce sales require an efficient document workflow

The option to ship to Germany, Czechia or the United States can be activated in an online store very quickly. Accounting, however, needs more information than the delivery address alone.

Before regular international sales begin, it is worth establishing whether the store records the customer’s status and country, where payment-operator reports will be available, who collects export documents and how accounting will receive information about returns. With several hundred orders, a well-configured data workflow saves considerably more time than explaining each discrepancy separately later.