Agencia Tributaria

Cash-basis VAT in Spain (RECC): what it is, who it actually helps, and the fine print nobody mentions

September 28, 2026

You invoice a project in March. Your client pays in 90 days, so the money doesn’t land until June. But you declare the first quarter in April, that invoice included, and you still have to pay the VAT you haven’t collected yet. You’re funding the Spanish Tax Agency (Agencia Tributaria) out of your own pocket until your client decides to pay you.

This isn’t a glitch: it’s how VAT works under the general regime. There’s a route designed exactly for this case, Spain’s special cash-basis VAT scheme (régimen especial del criterio de caja, RECC), which delays VAT until you actually collect it. The problem is that almost nobody mentions the part it also delays, or who it makes life harder for. Let’s go through it.

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Modelo 720: Your Broker Gave You a Spanish IBAN, But Your ETFs Can Still Require Reporting

September 21, 2026

Your broker sends a notice: “we’ve migrated your account to a Spanish IBAN.” And a rumor spreads, especially in investing forums, that this exempts you from Spain’s modelo 720 foreign-asset reporting form. For the cash account, that’s true. For the ETFs or funds sitting in the same broker’s custody account, it almost never is, and they’re two separate obligations governed by two separate rules.

Mixing the two is the mistake that’s spreading fastest right now among people investing through brokers like Trade Republic, DeGiro or similar, many of which have recently moved their clients’ cash accounts from a German or Dutch IBAN to a Spanish one, while the securities (custody) account stays exactly where it was.

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How Long You Can Carry Forward VAT to Offset Before You Lose It

September 11, 2026

You’ve been carrying a VAT balance to offset in box 110 of your modelo 303 for two or three years now. Every quarter you enter it, and every quarter it’s still there, a bit bigger or a bit smaller depending on how the business is going. You’ve never requested the refund, partly because nobody has told you there’s any rush. Is there?

The short answer is yes, although probably not in the way you’re worried about. The money doesn’t just vanish overnight. What has an expiry date is the mechanism you’re using to recover it: offsetting it quarter after quarter. Once that date passes you have to switch to a different route, and if you don’t know that, you can end up with neither.

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