Every line gets its own answer.
A receipt is not one tax decision. It is one decision per line, each against the rule of the country that issued the document. Pileform makes all of them, shows its working, and computes every figure rather than producing it.
The paper does not say which rate applies to what.
A Cyprus till receipt prints descriptions and a gross. It does not print a rate per line, and it very rarely prints a breakdown. Somebody has to decide, three times, for one small purchase.
One printed total. Two answers. Only one of them is legal.
The phrase at the foot of this receipt says the tax is already inside the total. Read it the other way, as a net subtotal with tax still to add, and every figure downstream moves: the expense, the input VAT you reclaim, and the gross you post.
The phrase that settles it, printed at the foot: ΦΠΑ συμπεριλαμβάνεται
| VAT engine | Read as inclusiveWhat the receipt says | Read as exclusiveThe common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Net expense | 12.61 | 14.13 |
| Input VAT reclaimed | 1.52 | 1.79 |
| Gross posted | 14.13 | 15.92 |
| Difference on this one receipt | +1.79 |
That is €1.79 on a single €14.13 receipt. Multiply it across a quarter of purchases and it stops being small, and it is a refiling rather than an adjustment: the VAT return was wrong, not the ledger untidy.
Change the country. Watch the answer change.
The registry covers 55 jurisdictions, with Cyprus as the home regime: 19% standard, 9% and 5% reduced, 3% super-reduced, 0% zero-rated. The engine reads the document to find which one issued it, then applies that country’s rule rather than a default.
- 55
- jurisdictions in the registry
- 5
- Cyprus bands, including zero
This is the real component, running. Pick a jurisdiction and the answer recomputes.
It reads the sentence, not a checkbox.
No document has a field called “inclusive”. It has a sentence, in its own language, at the foot of the page. These are the ones Pileform recognises, and the wording it finds is kept in the workbook so the decision can be checked rather than trusted.
- ΦΠΑ συμπεριλαμβάνεταιGreek
- incl. VATEnglish
- TTCFrench
- inkl. MwStGerman
- IVA incluidoSpanish
- IVA inclusaItalian
- KDV dahilTurkish
- incl. 6% GSTSingapore
The cases that catch people out.
- Reverse charge
Article 196 of Directive 2006/112/EC and its multilingual equivalents, detected and marked on the entry rather than left for somebody to notice at quarter end.
- Cash rounding
Cyprus tills round cash to 5c, so the drawer and the paper disagree by design. The gap gets its own adjustment column instead of being absorbed into a line where nobody will find it.
- Mixed regimes in one pile
A Cyprus receipt, a UK invoice and a German bill can sit in the same batch. Each is decided against its own issuing country, not against whichever one the batch started with.
- A rate that looks wrong
Plausibility is advisory. An implausible rate is flagged for a person and never quietly corrected, because a silently corrected figure is the one nobody checks.
- A rate that was never printed
The row is flagged and the figure is left blank. It is not inferred from the supplier, the category, or what the last one was.
The system never produces a number.
Text is transcribed as printed and an account code is suggested. Every amount, every VAT figure and every journal line is computed by deterministic code in integer cents, and asserted to balance before it is shown to you. When the money cannot be reconciled, the row is flagged and left blank rather than filled with something plausible.
19% · 9% · 5% · 3% · 0% — 12.61 + 1.52 = 14.13
Try it on a period you have already filed.
Run a real period for one company, exactly as it arrived. Compare what comes back against what you posted. That is a better test than any example we could build.