What your 303 comes to this quarter
The VAT you have charged less the VAT you have paid, with the credits you were carrying from earlier quarters and, if you have exempt activity, with the prorrata applied and rounded as the law requires. Payable or to carry forward, with no surprises on the 20th.
The 303 sum, in one line
Modelo 303 is the periodic VAT self-assessment, and underneath its three pages of boxes there is a very simple subtraction: what you have charged less what you have deducted. If it comes out positive, you pay. If it comes out negative, that balance is carried into the next quarter to be offset, or you ask for the refund on the last self-assessment of the year.
The form separates output VAT by rate and by origin — general regime, intra-Community acquisitions, reverse-charge transactions, recargo de equivalencia if you supply retailers — and it also separates the deductible side between ordinary domestic transactions, capital goods, imports and intra-Community acquisitions. This calculator works with the totals, which is what you want to know before you sit down to fill it in.
When it is filed
The VAT Regulations make it clear in article 71.4: the first three quarters are filed during the first twenty calendar days of the following month — April, July and October — and the fourth quarter during the first thirty calendar days of January. If you pay by direct debit, the deadline shortens by a few days: worth looking at before you leave it until the 19th.
Anyone who went over €6,010,121.04 of turnover the previous year, those on the monthly refund register and groups of entities, among others, file the 303 monthly rather than quarterly.
The prorrata, which is where spreadsheets break
If you carry out both transactions that give a right to deduct and exempt transactions that do not — regulated training, healthcare, residential letting, many activities of associations — you cannot deduct all the VAT you are charged. Only the percentage that your transactions carrying a right to deduct represent of the total.
The formula is in article 104.Dos of the VAT Act: you divide the annual value of the transactions carrying a right to deduct by the total transactions, multiply by a hundred, and there is one detail almost nobody gets right:
The resulting prorrata is rounded up to the next whole number. 78.2% is 79%, not 78%.
During the year a provisional prorrata applies, normally the previous year's final one, and on the last self-assessment of the year the final one is worked out and the deductions of the four quarters are adjusted. That adjustment is the one people forget, and the one that turns up later in a review.
What this calculator does not do
- It does not file the form. The 303 is filed at the Spanish Tax Agency's electronic office, with a certificate or Cl@ve.
- It does not decide which VAT is deductible. Article 96 of the VAT Act excludes whole categories, and there are separate rules for vehicles and for entertainment expenses.
- It does not work out late-filing surcharges, nor the spreading of capital goods over their years of adjustment.
A 303 should not come out of a spreadsheet
The risk in this sum is not the subtraction: it is that the figures going into it come from going through forty invoices by hand.
Worked out from your own documents
Output VAT comes from your invoices and input VAT from your expenses, split by rate and by origin, without typing in a single total.
Every box can be opened up
If a number does not add up, you can see which invoices make it up. That is the difference between correcting an error and hunting for it.
Prorrata and adjustment
The provisional one applies during the year and it is adjusted on the last self-assessment, which is exactly where the spreadsheet breaks.
Questions about form 303
The quarter closes on the 20th, but it is prepared over the other eighty-nine days
In Cairos the 303 has been worked out since the first day of the quarter and it updates with every invoice. On the 20th all you have to do is look at it.
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