German VAT Update

As of midnight tonight, Germany is reducing their VAT rates from 19% to 16% and 7% to 5% on the reduced rate. That will be in effect until the end of December as an economic relief measure. 

If you're selling to German customers with their local tax rate, you may need to take action.

For SimpleCart and Commerce with manually configured tax rates, you'll need to update those in their respective dashboards. 

For Commerce using the EU VAT Rate Provider for automatic rates, we've already updated the source rates to change automatically tonight. However, your site keeps a long lived cache that you'll need to clear. For an upcoming Commerce update we've fixed that and reduced it to 12 hours. 

If you sell primarily in Germany, or have regular orders from German customers, you'll want to force that cache in the morning to make sure it's up-to-date as soon as possible. The cache file can be found in core/cache/commerce_taxes/euvatrates.cache.php. Simply remove that file; the next request for an EU tax rate will automatically fetch and write the cache file again.

Purchases/renewals from modmore and SiteDash will also charge the reduced rate starting tomorrow.