What is VAT collected?

VAT collected is the tax you charged customers on their orders — money passing through the business on its way to a tax office, not revenue. The KPI totals it for the selected period; the VAT summary lays it out by month next to the excl-tax and incl-tax revenue it sits between.

Formula

VAT collected    = Σ order tax totals   (net sales)
incl-tax revenue = excl-tax revenue + VAT collected

Worked example

A month shows €96,000 excl-tax revenue and €17,300 of VAT collected — a blended 19.5% effective rate, between Germany's 19% standard rate and higher-rate countries in the mix. The blend shifts with country mix and product mix (reduced rates), so a moving effective rate is expected; a jump in it usually means the country mix moved, which the per-country revenue split will confirm.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

Each order stores its tax total (tax_amount_base, EUR at the order date, with the original amount preserved). The KPI sums it over net sales in the period; v_vat_summary groups by calendar month with excl-tax revenue and the incl-tax sum beside it, and the per-country revenue widget carries the same tax figure per country. The basis is deliberately order-level: the canonical schema does not store per-line VAT rates, so the views report what was collected, not a rate-by-rate breakdown — enough for monitoring and reconciliation, not a substitute for the store platform's tax report when a filing needs per-rate detail.

Why it matters

VAT is the most common way store owners overestimate their business: platform dashboards love incl-tax totals, and a fifth of those never belonged to you. Keeping VAT visible but separated is what keeps every performance metric on the excl-tax basis — and the monthly series is a useful liability preview between filings, since collected VAT is money already owed.

Common mistakes

• Reading incl-tax figures as revenue. The margin you live on is a percentage of the excl-tax base; mixing bases overstates the business by the VAT rate.
• Using this for a filing's per-rate breakdown. Order-level totals cannot split standard from reduced rates; the store platform's tax report owns that.
• Ignoring cross-border rate effects. OSS thresholds and destination-country rates change the blend as you grow abroad; the effective rate drifting is geography, not error.

Where you see this in the app

The VAT Collected KPI, the VAT-by-month summary widget, and the VAT column of the country revenue table.