Tax management

Paying affiliates creates paperwork. Each payout needs an invoice, and in the EU it needs the right VAT treatment — which depends on where your business sits and where your affiliate sits. Referly handles that for you by generating self-billing invoices, where you raise the invoice on the affiliate’s behalf rather than waiting for them to send you one. For any of it to be correct, Referly needs to know who you are and where you’re established. That’s what this page is for. To find it, go to Settings, open Program details, and select Tax management. The page explains its own scope: set your legal entity country and billing details for self-billing PDFs, plus optional Netherlands tax exports. EU payouts use your country to work out VAT zones and domestic standard rates. Tax management is available from the Starter plan.

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Fill in your legal entity

Legal entity on invoices is the business Referly names as the customer — the payer — on every affiliate self-billing invoice. Use your registered legal entity, not a trading name or brand, since these documents may end up in front of a tax authority.

• Country — where your legal entity is established. Do this one first: it drives the VAT applied to payouts, decides whether the EU VAT field appears, and unlocks the Netherlands exports.
• Invoice email — your billing address for invoice correspondence.
• Company name — your registered company name. Referly derives your self-billing invoice number prefix from it, and shows you the prefix under the field as you type, so you can see what your invoice numbers will look like.
• Address, City, State / province, and ZIP / postal code — your registered address as it should appear on invoices.

Fill in all of it. A self-billing invoice missing an address or a company name is likely to be rejected as a valid document.

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Add your EU VAT number

If you selected a country in the EU, a VAT number (EU) field appears. Enter your VAT number and Referly checks it against VIES, the EU’s official VAT Information Exchange System, while you type:

• A spinner means the check is running.
• A green check means the number was verified against the VIES registry.
• An amber warning means it couldn’t be verified. Hover the icon to see why, and select the refresh icon beside it to try again.

An amber warning isn’t always your mistake. VIES is a live service that queries each member state’s own database, and national systems go offline for maintenance fairly often, so a number that’s perfectly valid can fail to verify temporarily. Check for a typo first — the country prefix is the usual culprit — then retry later. If it verifies once, you’re set. Getting this right matters because your VAT number and country together determine the VAT treatment on cross-border payouts, including whether the reverse charge applies.

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Require invoice details from affiliates

Require invoice information from affiliates decides whether affiliates must supply their own invoice and tax details before they can be paid: “Affiliates provide invoice and tax details before they can receive payouts when this is on.” Turn it on and affiliates can’t receive a payout until they’ve completed those details. That’s what makes your records complete — an affiliate’s own VAT number is what lets Referly treat an EU business-to-business payout correctly and what makes your intra-EU reporting add up. The trade-off is friction: an affiliate who ignores the request doesn’t get paid, and you’ll field the questions. On-screen guidance says as much, asking you to make sure the setting matches your compliance needs. If you pay affiliates in the EU, requiring it is usually the right call. If you pay a handful of affiliates domestically, you may not need it.

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Download your Netherlands tax reports

If you set your country to the Netherlands, an NL reporting exports section appears with reports built from payouts you’ve actually paid in a chosen period, using the VAT zones and amounts stored at the time. Pick a date range first. Until you do, you’ll see a note that choosing a range and applying it loads a preview, and that the CSV downloads unlock once the preview has loaded. Selecting a download without a range gives you Select a date range. Once the preview loads you get two reports:

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ICP lines

Your intra-EU paid payouts for the period, listing Country, Affiliate VAT, and Commission — the figures behind an ICP declaration. If there’s nothing to report you’ll see “No intra-EU lines for this period.” Select Download ICP (CSV) to export it, confirmed with ICP export downloaded.

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BTW summary

Rubric totals for the same period, laid out the way a Dutch VAT return expects: Select Download BTW summary (CSV) to export it, confirmed with BTW summary downloaded. Both files are a starting point for your accountant rather than a filed return. Preview the numbers on screen before downloading, and check them against your own books — the reports only cover payouts marked as paid within the range you chose.

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Save

A Save changes button appears at the bottom right once you’ve edited anything. Select it and you’ll see Tax settings saved. Report downloads don’t need saving.

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