ERP Requirements for EU Expansion: These 5 Features Are Essential
Delivery thresholds, country-specific tax rates, Intrastat filings: solve these manually and you slow down the very growth expansion is supposed to bring. This article shows you the 5 ERP features you need for scaling into EU markets, and what happens if they're missing.
Key takeaways
From €10,000 in net revenue in other EU countries, destination-country tax liability applies. Your ERP must monitor this threshold cumulatively across all channels and automatically switch the tax logic when it's exceeded, or you risk back taxes.
Every EU country has its own tax rates and its own rules for B2B transactions. Without automatic configuration in your ERP, the wrong tax rates end up on your invoices.
If you sell into the UK, Norway or Switzerland, you need an ERP that fetches exchange rates, issues invoices in foreign currency, and processes posting differences correctly.
Beyond certain thresholds in intra-community trade, you're required to file. Your ERP must automatically capture the mandatory data per delivery note and export it as CSV.
You've had to receive e-invoices in Germany since January 2025, and must issue them from 2027 or 2028. Your ERP should handle XRechnung and ZUGFeRD before the deadline hits.
What new requirements does an EU expansion place on your ERP?
New markets mean new compliance requirements, and they're not uniform across the EU. Every country has its own tax rates, its own filing obligations, its own thresholds. Sell into two or three EU countries and you quickly end up with a patchwork of manual processes.
For international expansion, an ERP has to map these requirements natively, without cumbersome workarounds or spreadsheets. The five features we walk through below are the test: what does your system need to be able to do before you create the first order in a new market?
Note: All tax-related statements in this article are general in nature. For your specific situation, consult your tax advisor. Xentral does not provide tax advice.
The 5 features at a glance: why they are not optional
OSS monitoring | automatic aggregation of EU revenue by country | manual consolidation across multiple systems, back taxes | ✅ Yes | low |
VAT handling (country-specific) | correct tax rates per country and transaction type, reverse charge | incorrect invoices, correction effort | ✅ Yes | medium |
Foreign currency (FX) | fetch rates, foreign-currency invoices, posting differences | manual conversion, posting errors | ✅ Yes | low |
Delivery threshold monitoring | cumulative monitoring of the €10,000 threshold, tax-rate switch as an option | incorrect tax treatment in EU mail order | ✅ Yes | medium |
Intrastat export | capture mandatory data per delivery note, CSV export | manual compilation, filing errors | ✅ Yes | medium |
In Xentral, the OSS monitoring and delivery threshold monitoring rows are covered by the same module: Delivery Threshold. It's built for cross-border B2C sales. You still file B2B revenue and sales from a warehouse in the destination country, for example via Amazon Pan-EU, locally.
1. OSS: the €10,000 threshold your ERP needs to know about
Since July 2021, a single delivery threshold has applied across the EU: once your net revenue with private customers in other EU countries adds up to more than €10,000, you have to remit local VAT in each of those countries.
That sounds manageable, but it gets complex fast once you sell across multiple channels.
The threshold applies cumulatively across all EU countries. If you're active on Amazon, in your own shop, and through B2B direct sales at the same time, there's no realistic way to track that manually.
The solution is the One-Stop-Shop (OSS) as an ERP integration: instead of registering separately in every country, you file all EU revenue centrally through the OSS procedure with Germany's Federal Central Tax Office. To do that, your ERP needs to automatically aggregate the relevant revenue by country, monitor the threshold, and switch the tax logic when it's exceeded.
In Xentral, you handle this via the Delivery Threshold module. It totals B2C revenue across all EU countries and shows you where you stand in the Current Revenue column. On request, it sends an email once the threshold is reached, and adjusts the tax rate automatically.
For this to work, you set up a delivery threshold for every EU country you ship to. The module covers cross-border B2C sales. You still file B2B revenue and sales from a warehouse in the destination country locally. More in the Xentral Helpcenter documentation on the OSS module.
The actual OSS registration and filing should be handled together with your tax advisor. Current rules are available from the Federal Central Tax Office.
2. VAT handling: automatically recognizing tax rates per country and reverse charge
Austria: 20% standard rate, 10% and 13% reduced.
France: 20% standard, 5.5% for food.
Netherlands: 21% standard, 9% reduced.
And that's just the start, because B2B transactions follow their own rules.
Sell to a business in another EU country with a valid VAT ID, and the reverse charge procedure applies. Tax liability shifts to the recipient, and you issue a tax-exempt invoice. Your ERP should recognize this automatically.
What happens without this feature: wrong tax rates on invoices, reverse-charge errors, correction effort, and in the worst case, back-tax claims in the destination country.
In Xentral, you store your products' tax rates for each EU country in the Delivery Threshold module. Xentral then applies them at taxation. Whether a document is treated as B2B or B2C is detected automatically, based on whether a VAT ID is on file. You verify the validity of the number directly in the customer address via a confirmation request to the Federal Central Tax Office, either as a simple or a qualified check. Every check is logged with date and result and serves as evidence for the tax office.
Note: You should regularly cross-check current tax rates per EU country with your tax advisor, or in the European Commission's overview of VAT rates in member states, since they can change.
Our overview page has more on accounting and tax automation in Xentral.
3. Foreign currency management: when the rate shifts between order and payment
If you sell into the UK, Norway or Switzerland, you invoice in GBP, NOK or CHF. That's demanding from an accounting standpoint. Between the day an invoice is issued and the day payment arrives, the exchange rate can shift. That difference needs to be posted correctly.
An ERP for foreign currency management in multi-country operations needs to do three things:
automatically fetch current rates
issue invoices in the relevant foreign currency
correctly process rate differences during payment reconciliation
What happens without this feature: manual conversion on every transaction, faulty postings, differences in the financial accounts that add up over months.
In Xentral, foreign currency management is built in. You pull current rates from the ECB with one click, either just for the currencies you've set up or for all available ones. Store the currency on the customer address, and Xentral pulls it into the order and invoice automatically.
You set purchase and sales prices per currency on the product, converted via the currency conversion table. The rate stored on the document feeds into the financial accounting export, so your accounting team can trace the conversion.
4. Delivery threshold monitoring: the moment you can't afford to miss
The €10,000 threshold isn't just an ongoing process. Your ERP doesn't just need to know when you reach the threshold. When it's exceeded, it has to automatically switch the tax logic: from German VAT to the destination country's tax rate.
If you sell to private customers in the EU through your own shop and several marketplaces, all of that revenue counts toward the same €10,000 total. Every channel pushes it up a little, and no one is tracking that on the side. That's exactly what cumulative monitoring is for.
What happens without this feature: you exceed the threshold without noticing, keep invoicing with German VAT, and end up with a problem with the tax authority in the destination country.
In Xentral, the Delivery Threshold module handles the monitoring. Setup is manageable, but not zero: you create a delivery threshold for every EU country you ship, or plan to ship, to. Xentral then totals B2C revenue across all these countries, notifies you by email once the threshold is reached, and switches the tax rate to the destination country. Details in the Helpcenter documentation on the delivery threshold module.
Two things are worth doing right away. First: set up delivery thresholds for all target countries at once, or you'll have to correct invoices retroactively. Second: check in the country list that the EU flag is correct. Only EU-flagged countries count toward the total.
5. Intrastat: the filing obligation many discover too late
If you do intra-community trade and exceed certain thresholds, you're required to file Intrastat. In Germany, the arrivals threshold currently stands at €3 million, the dispatches threshold at €1 million (as of January 2025). Filing is monthly and must include, for every delivery: commodity code (CN8), country of origin, weight, and invoice amount.
What happens without this feature: you have to compile the Intrastat filing manually from delivery notes, invoices and product master data, an enormous effort. Filing errors or omissions can lead to fines.
In Xentral, you set up the data basis in the product master: customs tariff number, country of origin and weight belong on every export-relevant product. These are the fields Intrastat and Extrastat filings need, and they're attached to every document. Miss them and it gets expensive at export time, because they may need to be added retroactively for every line item. You still create the filing itself outside Xentral, based on the data maintained there.
Current thresholds and filing obligations are published by the Federal Statistical Office. Whether you're required to file is best checked together with your tax advisor.
Ready for what's next: an ERP that handles e-invoices
If you're configuring your ERP right now with the right features for scaling into the EU, there's one more requirement worth building in from the start: the e-invoicing mandate.
Since January 2025, every domestic company must be able to receive and process e-invoices from other domestic companies. The obligation to issue e-invoices yourself is staggered: from 2027 for companies with more than €800,000 in prior-year revenue, from 2028 for everyone. Other EU countries follow in the coming years.
Your ERP needs to be able to issue invoices in a structured, EN 16931-compliant format. In Germany, that's XRechnung and ZUGFeRD. Build this into your setup now and you save yourself a second round of configuration later. Xentral supports both: XRechnung 3.0.2 as CII-XML, and ZUGFeRD 2.x in the EN16931 profile, a PDF with embedded XML that your customers can read even without e-invoicing software. You can receive e-invoices in both formats through the Payables module.
Conclusion: reach new markets with Xentral, without manual extra effort
EU expansion shouldn't be a project that fails because of your ERP. The 5 features in this article are the prerequisite for further scaling and compliance with your ERP in new EU markets.
See for yourself what Xentral offers
If you want to know how Xentral sets up your ERP with EU features for international scaling, start now directly with a needs assessment.