Submitting Intrastat Declarations

The EU Member States form the European Single Market in which goods, services, people, and capital may move freely. In the days before the establishment of the European Single Market, customs declarations had to be submitted for goods movements between Member States.

These customs declarations were also used for the retrieval of statistical data on intra-Community trade. Since these data are of particular importance for trade policy, the EU established the permanent statistical retrieval system Intrastat as a replacement for the intra-Community customs declarations that had ceased to exist.

With limited exceptions, Intrastat declarations only concern the movements of Union goods between the Member States. Receipts and dispatches are to be declared separately.

As a rule, only companies are required to submit information. A requirement to submit information only arises when receipts and dispatches in the previous year have exceeded a reporting threshold to be set by the national authorities. The reporting period or the reference period is generally the calendar month of the dispatch or the receipt of the goods.

The following data must be provided in an Intrastat declaration:

Unlike other Member States, Italy also collects data on the supply of services to or from other Member States as a part of the Intrastat declaration. To report the supply of services, the providers of information have to use codes from the EU's Statistical Classification of Products by Activity (CPA). This classification is also referred to as CPA 2008.

You can submit Intrastat declarations for services in Italy using SAP S/4HANA. SAP S/4HANA for international trade provides a numbering scheme and a numbering scheme content for the maintenance of CPA codes and the classification of products that represent services relevant for Intrastat declarations.

In the SAP GTS system and in the SAP S/4HANA feeder system, you have to define a provider of information for each company code of the feeder system that submits Intrastat declarations. Providers of information are master data which you create, change, and display using the Manage Providers of Information app in the SAP Fiori launchpad of both the SAP GTS system and the SAP S/4HANA feeder system. In SAP S/HANA, the provider of information has to be specified in the programs that select data for Intrastat declarations. SAP ECC uses the company code for data selection.

In the master record of the provider of information, you maintain general data, such as the exact address, the value added tax registration number, and the declaration currency as well as information on the file format of the declaration (for example, ASCII or XML). The provider of information has no direct connection to the company code of the feeder system it represents.

The delivery Customizing for SAP GTS contains a business partner role for the provider of information (SLLPOI). You can assign this role to a business partner representing a company code in addition to the "Foreign Trade Organization" (SLLFTO) role. Tax numbers are copied from the business partner's master record to the master data of the provider of information.

After successful document data selection in the feeder system and data transfer to SAP GTS, you can process the data of the Intrastat declarations in SAP GTS using the Manage Intrastat Declarations app. If mandatory data are missing in a line item of the declaration, the system issues an incompleteness log in the line item’s details. You can add missing data or, if required, change data.

After completing the data, you can release the Intrastat declaration. In the next step, you create a file containing the data of the declaration and save the file on a computer in your company’s network. The system automatically formats the data according to the file format specified in the master record of the provider of information.