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How rates change

Tax rates are set by law, country by country. They are the same for every retailer in a country, so Hii Retail keeps one list for all tenants, and Extenda maintains it. When a country changes a rate, Extenda changes it once, and every company with stores there gets it.

No tenant can change the list itself. What a company decides is which taxable group each of its items is in, on the item's price, and which tax region each store is in, on the business unit. See How a rate is found.

Asking for a change​

Ask your Extenda contact when you need:

  • a new country, before the first store opens there
  • a new tax region, such as an island or territory with rates of its own
  • a new taxable group in a region
  • a rate the country has announced, with the date it applies from
  • an alias for your old tax-group codes, while you migrate to Hii Retail. See Tenant aliases.

Extenda's tax team keeps the country rates, checks the change and has it released. Ask as soon as a rate change is announced: it can be released well before its date and will start to apply on that date by itself.

What is sent when a change is released​

When a change is released, Tax Rules sends a message for every country that changed, holding that country's whole set of rules: all its regions, all its rules, and all their rates, the old, the current and any announced ones. When the global list of taxable groups changes, every country is sent.

Extenda adds Finland's new Reduced rate, 13.5 % from 2026-01-01, and releases it. Tax Rules sends one message, for Finland only, holding all of Finland's rules and rates. Business Unit Management and Store Data receive it, and Store Data passes the rates on to the stores. Spain, Sweden and the other countries get no message, because they did not change.

Store Data receives the message and passes the rates on to the stores, so a till has them without asking. Any system can also read them with the Tax Rules API. The message itself is described in Messages to other services.

🛑 A rate announced in advance is sent before it applies​

A new rate is sent when it is released, not on the date it applies. On that date, nothing is sent: the rate is already in the list everyone has, and it simply becomes the one whose date has come.

Finland announces Reduced 13.5 % from 2026-01-01. Extenda releases it on 2025-12-04 and Tax Rules sends Finland's rules that day, with both 14 % and 13.5 % in them. On 2026-01-01 no message is sent. A till that picks the rate by the sale's date uses 14 % until 31 December and 13.5 % from 1 January.

So a system that keeps tax rates must keep every rate with its date, and choose by the date of the sale. A system that keeps only "the rate in the latest message" would start using 13.5 % on 4 December, four weeks early, and a system that waits for a message on 1 January would never switch.

The same holds the other way round. A return or a correction of an old sale is taxed at the rate of the original sale's date, and the old rates stay in the list for that reason.

The Tax Rules API answers with the rate that applies today unless asked for the whole list. See Current rate or the whole list.

When only some goods in a group change rate​

A rate belongs to the whole taxable group in a region, and every item in the group follows it. So when a country changes the rate for only some of the goods in a group, the group's rate stays, and those items move to another group instead.

When Sweden lowered the VAT on food to 6 %, the Reduced group stayed at 12 %, because the other goods in it, such as hotel stays, still carry 12 %. Food moved to ReducedLow, which already had 6 %. The tax rules did not change: each company moved its food prices to the new group, from the date the new rate applied.

In Sweden, food and hotel stays were both in the Reduced group at 12 %. When the VAT on food went down to 6 %, the Reduced group stayed at 12 % for hotel stays, and food moved to the ReducedLow group, which already had 6 %. The tax rules did not change: the food prices got a new taxable group.

So when a change like this is announced, the work is on your prices: set the new taxableGroupId on the affected prices, valid from the date of the change. Ask Extenda only if no existing group in the region has the new rate.

Sending the rules again​

On request, Extenda can send the current rules again, for every country or for some, and for every tenant or for one. A service that has lost its copy, or a new service that needs one, gets the same message as on a release, with the same Tax-Timestamp: the time the rules last changed, not the time they were sent again. A service that already holds those rules changes nothing.