ERP and accounting software for Finland: VAT, Finvoice

Finnish compliance in one view

Running the books of a Finnish business means filing VAT monthly by default in MyTax, reporting every wage payment to the Incomes Register within five days, being ready to send e-invoices to any business customer that asks, keeping books for ten years and vouchers for six, and appointing an auditor unless the company is very small. It matters because each of those obligations reads directly from the ledger.

Verohallinto, the Finnish Tax Administration, administers VAT, company tax and withholding through MyTax, and also runs the Incomes Register, the national database of wages and benefits. The State Treasury publishes the national e-invoicing guidance. Accounting rules come from the Accounting Act (1336/1997) and audit rules from the Auditing Act (1141/2015).

This page sets out what those rules require as of September 2026, what they mean for an ERP, and how Skyline Nexus ERP supports a Finnish business.

• Tax authority: Verohallinto, filing through MyTax
• Payroll reporting: the Incomes Register
• Currency: euro; general VAT rate 25.5%
• E-invoicing: on request between businesses since 1 April 2020
• Accounting: Accounting Act 1336/1997; audit: Auditing Act 1141/2015

VAT rates after three changes

The general rate of 25.5% applies to most goods and services, from clothes and building supplies to accounting, cleaning, hairdressing and construction services. It took effect on 1 September 2024, replacing 24%.

The reduced rate of 13.5% has applied since 1 January 2026, down from 14%. It covers groceries and animal feed, restaurant services and meal services, passenger transport by taxi, bus, train and domestic flight, accommodation, books, pharmaceuticals, sports and fitness services, admission to cultural events, performers' fees and, from 2026, public broadcasting. On 1 January 2025 most items that had been at 10% moved to the reduced rate, which leaves newspapers and magazines as the only supplies at 10%. A 0% rate with a right to deduct input VAT applies to certain supplies such as exports outside the EU and intra-EU sales of goods to VAT-registered buyers.

The Tax Administration's own examples show why this is a line-level problem. A taxi driver charges 13.5% on passenger transport but 25.5% on food deliveries. A grocery order that mixes food and detergent splits the delivery charge between the two rates in proportion to the goods. An invoice or credit note must carry the rate that applied when the supply was made, not today's.

• 25.5% general rate since 1 September 2024
• 13.5% reduced rate since 1 January 2026 (previously 14%)
• 10% for newspapers and magazines only
• 0% with deduction for exports and intra-EU B2B goods

Registration, tax periods and corrections

A business must register for VAT once its turnover exceeds EUR 20,000 in a calendar year, and VAT is payable from the day the threshold is exceeded, so turnover has to be watched during the year. Voluntary registration below the threshold is possible. The old VAT relief for small businesses no longer applies to accounting periods starting on or after 1 January 2025.

The tax period is normally one month, with the return and payment due on the 12th of the second month after the month. Quarterly filers report by 12 May, 12 August, 12 November and 12 February, and calendar-year filers by the end of February. A return is required for every period, even with no activity, and the due dates cannot be extended. Businesses with turnover under EUR 500,000 may use cash-based VAT, allocating VAT to the month when payment is received or made.

Errors are corrected by filing a replacement return for the period concerned, within three years counted from the start of the calendar year after the period. An error of no more than EUR 500 may instead be corrected on the next return, provided no more than 45 days have passed since the original due date. Sales to other EU countries also require VAT recapitulative statements alongside the returns.

E-invoicing: what Finnish law requires today

Finland does not have a clearance model, but it does have an e-invoicing obligation already in force. The Act on Electronic Invoicing of Procurement Entities and Entrepreneurs (241/2019) did two things. Contracting authorities must accept and process e-invoices under public contracts, and, from 1 April 2020, contracting authorities and businesses have the right to receive an invoice as an e-invoice on request from another business. For the Act a business is one whose turnover in the financial period exceeds EUR 10,000.

An e-invoice under the Act is one drawn up, transmitted and received in a structured electronic format that allows automatic processing and follows the European standard EN 16931 in one of the permitted syntaxes. In practice Finnish e-invoices travel through e-invoicing operators and banks, commonly as Finvoice, the standard published by Finnish banks and now at version 3.0, or through the Peppol network. The State Treasury points out that invoices sent as PDF or image attachments by email are not e-invoices, and that a customer's e-invoice address can be checked in the national e-invoice address register.

What does not exist, as of September 2026, is a Finnish real-time reporting or clearance mandate. We are not going to invent one. The EU's VAT in the Digital Age package will require e-invoices and digital reporting for cross-border B2B supplies between member states from 1 July 2030.

• Since 1 April 2019: public bodies must accept EN 16931 e-invoices
• Since 1 April 2020: businesses can require e-invoices from suppliers
• Threshold: supplier turnover above EUR 10,000
• Common formats: Finvoice 3.0 and Peppol; PDF by email does not qualify

Accounting, financial periods, audit and retention

Finnish companies keep their books under the Accounting Act and its ordinance, following good accounting practice, and most unlisted companies prepare financial statements under those national rules, often called Finnish Accounting Standards. Listed groups prepare consolidated accounts under EU-adopted IFRS.

A financial period is twelve months. When a business starts or stops trading, or changes its balance sheet date, a period may be shorter or longer, but never more than eighteen months, and all of a business's operations must share one financial period. That means a system has to handle a first long period and non-calendar years without forcing either into the calendar.

Under the Auditing Act a company may leave the auditor unappointed only if, in both its last financial year and the one before, it met no more than one of three conditions: a balance sheet total above EUR 100,000, turnover above EUR 200,000, and more than three employees on average. The Accounting Act requires the books to be kept for at least ten years from the end of the financial period, and vouchers, business correspondence and reconciliation records for at least six years from the end of the year in which the period ended.

Payroll: the Incomes Register

Finland replaced monthly payroll returns with the Incomes Register. Each payment of wages, fees and benefits is reported on an earnings payment report within five calendar days of the payment date, meaning the day the employee can access the money. The deadline follows the payment date, not the period in which the pay was earned, so a January payment for December work is reported by the January deadline.

Employers also file an employer's separate report, with the total of the employer's health insurance contribution, by the 5th of the calendar month following the reporting month. Reporting of gender pay gap data for pay transparency through the Incomes Register will begin gradually from 2027.

For the ledger the consequence is a payroll journal per pay run and a monthly reconciliation of withholding and employer contributions to what the Incomes Register and MyTax hold.

Cities and regions: where the rules differ

On the Finnish mainland the rules are national. A business in Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Lahti or Kuopio charges the same VAT, files the same returns in MyTax and reports pay to the same Incomes Register. Municipal income tax rates differ, but they reach the employer through each employee's tax card rather than through any regional return.

The exception is the Åland Islands, whose capital is Mariehamn. Under the Act on the exceptions concerning the Åland Islands in VAT and excise legislation (1266/1996), Åland is not treated as part of Finland's territory for the EU VAT rules on intra-Community trade. Sales of goods located in Åland are taxed as sales in Finland, but goods moving between Åland and mainland Finland or other EU countries cross a tax border and are handled like exports and imports rather than intra-EU trade. A Turku wholesaler supplying a Mariehamn customer needs tax codes and documentation for that border.

Language is the other regional factor. Finnish and Swedish are both national languages, Åland is Swedish-speaking, and bilingual municipalities such as Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Turku mean customer documents are often needed in both.

How Skyline Nexus ERP handles Finnish requirements

Skyline Nexus ERP is a cloud ERP with a double-entry general ledger under the Fiscal Authority menu. When an administrator switches on the auto-post settings, which start off, final sales, purchases, payments, expenses and depreciation post balanced journals in the background, with output VAT computed per line on the same basis as the tax report, so a 25.5% line and a 13.5% line on one invoice each post at their own rate. The VAT Return screen prefills tax-exclusive sales and purchase bases and VAT for a date range, ready for the bookkeeper to enter in MyTax. Fiscal years can be created with any start and end date and monthly or quarterly periods, which covers non-calendar years and a long first period; posted journals are corrected by reversal; periods can be soft-closed or locked; and the Accounting Audit Trail records changes with old and new values.

A tax rate is held as a single percentage, so a change such as 14% to 13.5% on 1 January 2026 is made by creating the new rate and moving the affected products to it on the day, while a sales return against an earlier invoice reuses the tax of the original line. The Audit Pack exports a calendar year's chart of accounts, trial balance, general ledger, journal lines, sales, purchases and VAT summary to one Excel workbook, worth archiving alongside the ledger for the six- and ten-year retention periods.

National e-invoicing connectors are being rolled out market by market, and Finvoice and Peppol invoicing for Finland are part of that programme: tell us your country and we will confirm your go-live date. Until then, when a business customer asks for e-invoices, the working route is an e-invoicing operator fed through a partner-led integration using the Skyline Nexus ERP Connector REST API. Finnish payroll and Incomes Register reporting run in Finnish payroll software or through a payroll partner, with the payroll journal posted to the ledger each month. The interface language selector includes Finnish and Swedish; the accounting screens display in English.

Rates, regimes and deadlines in this summary change, and many countries are actively legislating on e-invoicing. This is general information, not tax or legal advice — confirm the current position with the authority named above or with your tax adviser before you rely on it.