Vintro Pro
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Vintro Pro
NL · FR · EN
Seven links, from the moment a piece comes in to the VAT return. What you record, what the law asks in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and where it goes wrong in practice.
With one-off pieces, stock management is not counting quantities. It is holding seven links together.
In an ordinary shop, stock management is a matter of counting. There are seventeen of that model, four go out, at five you reorder. In second-hand, vintage and antiques that does not work: every piece is the only one. You cannot reorder, there is no average purchase price, and the reorder point — the number below which you buy more — simply does not exist.
What takes its place is a chain. A piece comes in, gets a number, gets a label, sits on the shelf, leaves with an invoice, and ends up in a VAT return. Each link hands over to the next. If one breaks you only notice much later: at the annual stocktake, at an inspection, or on the day a customer asks what that cabinet cost again.
This guide walks those seven links in the order you meet them in practice. Where a legal obligation is involved, you will find what the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and France each require, with the source and the date we measured it. Where it is only a way of working, that is said too — it saves you a conversation with your accountant.
Seven links. The top row is what happens to the piece, the bottom row is what happens to the paperwork. The two run alongside each other and touch in two places: at the label and at the invoice.
A stocktake is not only the yearly ritual of counting everything. That one exists too, and it comes later. The stocktake starts with each piece separately, on the day it comes in, and it takes two minutes.
The reason to do it straight away is mundane: what you paid today you still know tonight. In three months it is an estimate. And an estimated purchase price gives an estimated margin, so estimated VAT. That is the kind of mistake that only surfaces at an inspection, when you can no longer put it right.
Give every piece one number, and never reuse it — not even when the piece is sold, taken back or thrown away. That sounds like a detail until the one time you do reuse one. A reused number means two different pieces carry the same label, the same invoice line and the same stock book line, and afterwards that cannot be untangled.
A running number is enough: 1, 2, 3. A letter in front for the year or the category is fine, but keep it short — it has to fit on a label and you have to be able to spell it down the phone. What you must not do is let the number depend on something that can change: not the spot in the shop, not the price, not the supplier.
Below is the minimum. You fill in the first seven fields when the piece arrives, the last four when it sells. Anything on top of that — dimensions, condition, provenance, story — is a bonus, not an obligation.
| Field | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Stock number | The thread running through everything: label, stock book, invoice, photo. |
| Purchase date | Without a date there are no days in stock, and so no rotation. |
| Who you bought from | Decides whether the piece can fall under a margin scheme at all. Name and address. |
| Purchase price | The amount you paid for this piece. Not an average. |
| Description | What a third party needs to find the piece without you. |
| Photo | On a one-off piece the photo is the description. It belongs with the data, not in a separate folder. |
| Asking price | What is on the label. If the price changes you want to know when and why. |
| Sale date | Together with the purchase date: how long the piece stood. |
| Sale price | The other half of your margin. |
| Buyer | Needed for the invoice, and for your evidence on a sale across a border. |
| Scheme | Margin or ordinary VAT. This field decides what ends up in the return. |
Anyone starting today with a shop full of stock faces a mountain. The temptation is to begin with whatever comes in new and do the rest “later”. That later never arrives.
Better is a baseline: number and photograph everything once, and only then switch over. Reckon on a minute or two per piece. On four hundred pieces that is a good working day — tedious, but one-off, and it is the only day your whole stock is right at once. Whatever you can no longer remember about a purchase price, write down honestly as an estimate and mark it as one; that beats a number that looks too precise.
Alongside that sits the classic annual stocktake: at the end of the financial year you count what is really there and value it. For goods held for resale the valuation is the purchase price, not the asking price — you do not book a profit on something still on the shelf. For pieces that have clearly lost value, the lower figure belongs in the books. Exactly how to value is a question for your accountant; what you supply is the list.
The difference between what you count and what your system says is, incidentally, the most useful number of the whole year. If it is right to within one piece, your chain works. If there are twenty gaps in it, you know straight away where to put the effort next year.
This is the first point where the four countries diverge, and the gap is wide enough not to guess at.
And longer for as long as the piece has not been sold.
VAT records, article 60 of the Belgian VAT Code.
VAT records; 10 years for immovable property.
After the livre de police has been closed.
Note the UK figure: the period only starts running from the sale. A piece that sits in your shop for eight years therefore has a file that lives for fourteen. That is exactly why a paper archive becomes unmanageable so quickly in the antiques trade.
The margin scheme is the reason stock management in this trade is different from every other shop. It exists because a second-hand item has already borne VAT once, when it was new. Charging VAT on the full price again at every resale would stack that tax up until second-hand cost more than new.
The solution: you pay VAT on your profit margin instead of on your selling price. In the UK, HMRC runs its own VAT margin schemes, entirely outside the EU system since 2021; the equivalent EU principle sits in article 315 of Directive 2006/112/EC — the margin is the difference between the selling price and the purchase price, less the VAT contained in that margin. Each of the four countries has its own name for it and its own paperwork.
Not every second-hand item. The scheme only works if you bought the piece from someone who could not charge VAT on it themselves. In practice that is three sources:
The most common source. A private seller charges no VAT, so the margin is the right starting point.
A charity or a business with no right to reclaim. There is no recoverable VAT in that purchase either.
Another dealer selling under a margin scheme themselves. Their invoice carries no reclaimable VAT.
If you buy on an ordinary invoice with VAT you can reclaim, that piece falls outside the scheme. That is no disaster — you reclaim the VAT and charge VAT on the full price when you sell — but it does mean both kinds run through your shop at the same time. Hence the need to keep them apart. What counts as eligible goods is set out in more detail in What are margin scheme goods?.
Keeping margin and ordinary apart is not optional. If you cannot demonstrate it, you fall back to the ordinary scheme with VAT on the full selling price — and in second-hand that is almost always worth more than your margin.
No prescribed form, but purchase and sale of the same item on the same line.
Purchase, sale and a comparison register. Royal Decree no. 53 of 23 December 1994.
Plus the split between margin goods and VAT goods in the accounts.
The registre des objets mobiliers, with the seller's identity recorded.
The British stock book is the most honest design of the four: by putting purchase and sale on one line, the Belgian comparison register simply does not exist there as a separate document. Anyone keeping stock piece by piece rather than by list gets that comparison automatically — which is exactly the work a spreadsheet leaves you to do by hand.
Your margin is selling price minus purchase price. Nothing more. Restoration hours, new parts, transport, the pitch fee at a fair, the electricity in your workshop: none of it lowers your margin. HMRC writes it out in full in its guidance on the margin schemes — your purchase price does not include the cost of repair, refurbishment or your business overheads, and you must not add them to it. For the EU countries the same follows from article 315 of the Directive.
That is not a small thing. Buy a cabinet for 200, put 300 of parts and labour into it and sell it for 700, and your margin is 500 — not 200. The VAT is worked out on that 500. You can usually still reclaim the VAT on those parts as input tax, but that is a different movement in a different box of your return.
Never work with a margin that has your own hours netted off. The tax office knows two figures: what you paid and what you got.
How much VAT sits in a margin differs by country. The UK and France work at 20%, Belgium and the Netherlands at 21% — which on 100 of margin comes to 16.67 against 17.36. HMRC states the UK figure as one-sixth of the margin. Those rates, with source and measurement date, are in What is margin VAT?, and the calculation itself in How do you calculate margin VAT?.
There is one more difference that genuinely costs money: do you work out your margin item by item, or across all your margin sales in a VAT period? The second — global accounting in the UK, globalisation elsewhere — becomes attractive as soon as some items sell at a loss, because a loss on one then reduces the taxable margin on another. The UK runs a separate global accounting scheme with its own eligibility rules; France calculates item by item by law, with globalisation as an option. Do not pick this yourself: it is a question for your accountant, and the answer decides how your system has to count.
⚠️ One thing that only affects readers under Belgian VAT: since 31 December 2025 the margin scheme there is excluded after a reduced rate has been applied, with a recovery arrangement running to 31 December 2026. Law of 19 December 2025, implementing Directive (EU) 2022/542, explained in circular 2026/C/14 of 13 January 2026. As at 8 September 2026 the Belgian FPS Finance had not yet updated its own page on the margin scheme — if your accountant cannot find it, that is why. None of this applies in the UK.
Two pieces of paper belong to every item: one from when you bought it and one from when you sold it. Everybody knows the second. The first is the one that most often goes missing, and it is the one your whole margin scheme rests on.
A private seller does not issue an invoice. So you make one, and have it signed. Without that paper you cannot later show what you paid and to whom — and then there is no demonstrable purchase price, so no demonstrable margin.
What goes on it: the date, your details, the name and address of the seller, a description of the piece, the stock number you have just given it, the amount paid, and a signature. HMRC expects the seller's name and address in the stock book for exactly this reason. In France the livre de police goes further and requires the seller's identity to be recorded — there this is not only a tax document but a police one. Two minutes of work, and it is the one piece of paper you cannot create after the fact.
If you sell under a margin scheme, the most important rule in this whole guide comes out in the negative: no VAT amount appears on your invoice. Not on a separate line, not in a column, not as “included”. The VAT you account for is your business, not your customer's, and your customer cannot reclaim it.
In its place comes a note that the special scheme has been applied. The exact wording differs by country and by language; your accountant or your software will give you the text that belongs there. Put a VAT amount on it anyway and you owe that amount on top of the VAT on your margin — the same money twice.
Invoices follow an unbroken sequence per year. A gap in the numbering is the first thing an inspection notices.
A sent invoice is not edited. Wrong? Then you raise a credit note and a new invoice.
Invoice number next to the stock number. A customer question then takes one search, not three.
This is the link that is changing fastest, and the only one where “does not apply” is a real answer — and for a UK reader it is the answer.
HMRC does not require a structured e-invoice between businesses.
Between VAT-registered businesses, via Peppol.
Allowed, but only with the buyer's agreement.
For French businesses; sending immediately for large and medium, from 1 Sep 2027 for small.
For a UK shop this means nothing has to change today. It starts to matter the moment you invoice a Belgian or French business: they are on the receiving end of a mandate, and they may ask you for a structured invoice even though you are not required to send one. For a Belgian or French shop the obligation bites between businesses; sales to private customers — the bulk of a second-hand shop's turnover — are untouched.
A label looks like the least technical part of this chain, and it is the only one that is legally required in all four countries with virtually the same content. That is worth saying out loud once: here the four countries agree.
Article 7: unambiguous, easily identifiable and clearly legible, with no need to ask for assistance.
In writing, legible, clearly visible and unambiguous. Total price including VAT and all taxes, in euro.
Articles 3 and 4: state the selling price, including VAT and other taxes.
Article 1: the total amount including all taxes, in euro. Article 4: a written sign or a label.
The UK text carries one exception that comes in useful in this trade: jewellery, precious metals and watches over £3,000 displayed in a shop window do not have to show the price in the window. For everything else the rule applies in full.
The law asks for the price. Your own chain asks for more. Three things you add because they save you work later:
What you do not put on it is information that exists nowhere else. The classic mistake is the price that lives only on the ticket: that ticket comes off, fades or gets swapped, and then the price is gone with it. The label is a print-out of your system, never the source.
On formats: no size is prescribed. What matters is that the label stays with the piece. A hanging tag on a cabinet, a sticker on a book, a card in a box of smalls — something different per type of item, but always one print-out from the same system, so the price on the label and the price on your list cannot drift apart. How that works in Vintro Pro is in the guide to printing labels.
Four numbers and your country. The calculator shows what is left after VAT and — the part more often forgotten — what that returns per month on the money you put in.
VAT is worked out on selling price minus purchase price, the way HMRC describes it for the UK and article 315 of Directive 2006/112/EC for the EU countries: your costs do not reduce that margin. What is left is that margin minus the VAT minus your costs. The third figure divides that by your outlay and by time — two pieces with the same profit are not worth the same if one stands three months and the other three years. Rates: 20% in the UK and France, 21% in Belgium and the Netherlands, measured on 2 September 2026 at each tax authority separately. This is an estimate, not a return.
Stock is not an asset, it is money tied up. For as long as a piece stands in your shop, you cannot use that amount to buy the next one. In second-hand that bites harder than elsewhere, because you cannot reorder: every pound standing still is a pound you cannot put into an auction or a house clearance.
Rotation measures how often your stock turns over in a year. Divide your annual purchase value by your average stock value and you have the figure. Divide 365 by that rotation and you have your stock days: how long an average piece stays with you. Both calculations, with a calculator, are in What is stock rotation?.
There is no universally good figure. Vintage clothing and small furniture turn fast and in numbers; antiques stand longer and tie up more per piece. Waiting for the right buyer is not a mistake in antiques, it is the business model — a cabinet that stands two years and then leaves on a strong margin can be a better deal than ten quick sales on thin ones.
What does hold for everyone: you have to know. The difference between “that cabinet has been there a while” and “that cabinet has been there 780 days with 3,400 tied up in it” is the difference between a feeling and a decision.
Dead stock is what has stood for a long time and which you assume, without noticing, will go eventually. It costs you two things at once: the money in it and the space it takes. Once a quarter, pull the list of everything standing longer than twelve months and decide piece by piece. There are only four outcomes:
The asking price does not match what the market gives. Note when you dropped it, so a quarter later you can see whether it helped.
What sits in the shop sometimes sells online within the week — and the other way round.
To a colleague, to a trade buyer. Less margin, but the money comes free for something that does move.
The fourth outcome is keeping it deliberately. That is a decision too, as long as you take it rather than have it happen to you. More on how much sits asleep in an average shop is in What is dead stock?.
In an ordinary shop a reorder point guards your shelves. With one-off pieces it does not exist, because there is nothing to reorder. What replaces it is a rate: how many pieces do you have to bring in per week to keep your shelves filled at your current selling speed? Sell twelve pieces a month and you need to find roughly three a week — and that is the number deciding how many auctions, clearances and fairs you have to work. The calculator for it is in Stock management for antiques and vintage.
The word export means two things in this trade, and you need both. One is about your data, the other about your goods.
Wherever your stock lives, you have to be able to pull a readable file out of it at any moment. That is useful not once a year but four times:
In practice: pick a format a human can read (CSV or XLSX), check that the photos come with it or that there is at least a reference to them, and do that export once for real — not by reading on the website that it is possible, but by pressing the button and opening the file.
The second meaning is the tax one. The moment a piece leaves your country the treatment changes, and the margin scheme is the most sensitive part of it.
For a UK shop the picture since 2021 is straightforward in shape: a sale to anyone in the EU is an export, and an EU buyer deals with import VAT at their end. HMRC's own guidance is that margin scheme goods which are exported qualify for zero-rating on the conditions of Notice 703 — read on gov.uk, 31 August 2026. Northern Ireland follows its own rules and is worth checking separately.
For a shop inside the EU it runs differently. A sale to a private buyer in another EU country generally changes little: the piece stays a margin good and you account for it as at home. A sale to a dealer in another EU country raises the question of whether you stay under the margin or move to the ordinary scheme — the exemption for intra-Community supplies does not apply to margin goods. That is worked out in Selling margin goods to a dealer abroad, and the reverse in Buying in the EU: margin or reverse charge?.
⚠️ One question stays open for EU sellers, and we would rather write nothing than write something wrong: whether the export of a margin good has to be treated as a margin sale or as an exempt export, we could not confirm at an official source — not at the Belgian FPS Finance, not on EUR-Lex, measured on 31 August 2026. The difference is not small: on an exempt export no margin VAT is due. Put that particular case to your accountant before you write the first invoice.
For the movement into the EU from Britain there is Import VAT from the UK, with a calculator for what the import costs. And the British scheme itself is set out in The UK margin scheme.
This chapter comes last on purpose. Anyone who picks software first and builds their way of working around it almost always buys something made for quantities. And with one-off pieces, a system that counts in quantities is not slightly awkward — it is the wrong tool.
A spreadsheet can do everything above, legally speaking. No form is prescribed for your records; an orderly file is enough. In practice it trips on three places, and always the same three:
The honest answer is written out in Is a spreadsheet enough for your stock?. Short version: often yes, and for longer than salespeople tell you.
There is no fixed number of pieces above which it breaks, but there are signals. See whether you recognise three or more:
A customer question costs more time than registering the piece did.
Shop, fair and online, and you are no longer sure whether something is still available.
The moment a second person has to find something, your head is no longer a system.
Seven questions. If a package says no to more than two of them, it was built for a different kind of shop:
Compare that with what you actually need in Which system suits your shop? — a decision aid where the answer is four times not Vintro Pro.
The chain runs every day, but there are four moments when you step back from it.
Everything that came in is numbered, photographed and labelled. Nothing is left on a pile marked “later”.
Everything over twelve months on one sheet. One decision per piece: price, channel, sell on, or keep on purpose.
The two streams supplied separately. The splitting already happened piece by piece; here you only harvest it.
The real stocktake. The gap between what is there and what your system says is your report card for the year.
The temptation is to note ten similar chairs as one line with quantity ten. Sell three and you no longer know which three went, nor what you paid for those three — and so not your margin either.
What you paid today you still know tonight. In three months it is an estimate, and an estimated purchase price gives an estimated VAT return.
This is the one document you cannot create after the fact. Without a purchase note there is no demonstrable purchase price, and without that no demonstrable margin.
Your margin is selling price minus purchase price. Parts, hours and transport are not in it — HMRC writes it out, and article 315 of the Directive says the same for the EU.
Put a VAT amount on an invoice under a margin scheme and you owe that amount on top of the VAT on your margin. The same money twice.
A ticket comes off, fades or gets swapped. If the price is nowhere else, it is gone with the ticket.
Removing the row erases exactly the history you will need later. Close a piece off, do not delete it.
Four countries, four retention periods, four kinds of record, three different e-invoicing timetables. What is right at home is not right a hundred miles away.
Piece by piece, not by quantity. Every piece gets one number of its own that is never reused, and hanging off that number are at least the purchase date, who you bought it from, what you paid, a description, a photo, the asking price, and later the sale date and sale price. Ordinary stock software works with quantities and reorder points; with one-off pieces both of those fall away, because there is nothing to reorder. What replaces them is a rate: how many pieces come in each month against how many go out.
Yes. In all four countries this knowledge base covers you must be able to show which goods fall under a margin scheme and which under ordinary VAT. In the UK, HMRC expects a stock book in which the purchase and the sale of the same item sit on the same line; Belgium requires three registers under Royal Decree no. 53 of 23 December 1994, the Netherlands an opkopersregister and France a livre de police. If you cannot demonstrate the split, you fall back to the ordinary scheme, with VAT on the full selling price instead of on your margin.
Legally, at minimum the price the customer actually pays, including VAT and all other taxes, legible and without the customer having to ask for it. That holds in all four countries, each with its own text: the Price Marking Order 2004 in the UK, book VI of the Code of Economic Law in Belgium, the Besluit prijsaanduiding producten in the Netherlands and the arrêté of 3 December 1987 in France. In practice you add the piece number too, because a label that comes loose without a number cannot be traced back to anything.
No. Your margin is the difference between your selling price and your purchase price, and nothing else. HMRC puts it in so many words: your purchase price does not include the cost of repair, refurbishment or your business overheads, and you must not add those costs to it. For the EU countries the same follows from article 315 of Directive 2006/112/EC. You can usually still reclaim the VAT charged on those parts and repairs as input tax, but that is a separate movement. Never work with a margin that already has your workshop hours netted off.
Often yes, and for longer than people think. A spreadsheet tips over on three things: the photos live somewhere other than the numbers, a sold piece gets deleted instead of closed, and the link between purchase and sale stays manual. As long as you still know everything by heart it holds. Around a hundred pieces, every customer question costs you two searches instead of one, and the spreadsheet starts costing money rather than saving it.
Written on 8 September 2026. The price marking obligation was measured on 8 September 2026 at legislation.gov.uk (Price Marking Order 2004, SI 2004/102, art. 7), economie.fgov.be (book VI CEL, art. VI.3 to VI.6), wetten.overheid.nl (Besluit prijsaanduiding producten, BWBR0015104, art. 3 and 4) and legifrance.gouv.fr (arrêté of 3 December 1987, LEGITEXT000006057893, art. 1 and 4). The rule that costs do not reduce your margin comes from HMRC's guidance on the VAT margin schemes and from article 315 of Directive 2006/112/EC, measured on 8 September 2026. Retention periods and records per country were measured on 30 August 2026, the VAT rates on 2 September 2026 and the e-invoicing dates on 30 and 31 August 2026 — each at that country's own authority, and written out on the pages linked above.
This is an explanation of stock management, not tax or legal advice. Which scheme, which record and which period apply to your shop is something to check with your accountant or your own tax authority.
Every piece gets its own number, its own photo and its own page. The label with a QR code prints itself, margin and ordinary VAT stay apart, and you can export your stock list whenever you want.
Free up to 10 pieces, no card details and no end date.