EU Fiscal Composer setup for boutique hotels — FR, IT, DE, ES
Country-correct invoicing wired to the SiteMinder reservations feed. This guide is how Hotelminder advisors activate the four most-requested EU countries on a boutique property.
Boutique hotels that operate in more than one EU country tend to inherit an invoicing setup that half-works: a template built by the previous accountant for one country, hand-adjusted for a second, and quietly broken for the third. EU Fiscal Composer on the Hotelminder shortlist replaces that fragile stack with a single module that reads reservations from your SiteMinder subscription and issues country-correct fiscal documents. What follows is the activation sequence for the four countries most Hotelminder pilots ask for first.
France — the facture with mentions obligatoires
France requires that every invoice carry a specific list of mentions obligatoires under Code général des impôts: legal form of the issuer, SIREN, SIRET, RCS registration, TVA intracommunautaire number, invoice date, unique sequential number, buyer identity, itemised description, unit price excluding tax, applicable VAT rate, total excluding tax, total including tax, and payment terms including late-payment penalty language. Fiscal Composer holds all of this in the property profile — you set it once at onboarding and every invoice inherits.
The VAT breakdown for a French boutique hotel is: 10% on accommodation (nuitée), 10% on breakfast served in the room or included in the tariff, 20% on ancillaries (spa, boutique products, corkage), and a separate line for the taxe de séjour collected on behalf of the commune. Fiscal Composer separates each line automatically. Invoices are archived in PDF/A-3 format, which is the archival format the French tax authority accepts for the ten-year retention requirement.
Italy — fattura elettronica and Sistema di Interscambio
Italy requires that every B2B and B2C invoice be issued in the fattura elettronica XML format and routed through the Sistema di Interscambio (SdI). Fiscal Composer generates the XML in the schema required by the Agenzia delle Entrate and transmits it to SdI on your behalf. The property registers its Codice Univoco (CU) once at onboarding and the module handles the routing. Confirmation of receipt from SdI writes back to the reservation record inside SiteMinder as an attachment.
VAT breakdown for an Italian boutique hotel: 10% on accommodation and short-stay under thirty nights, 22% on ancillaries (bar, minibar, laundry, spa). The imposta di soggiorno collected on behalf of the comune is a separate line and does not enter the VAT calculation. Fiscal Composer holds the imposta rate per comune and updates the table each January.
Germany — Rechnung and Beherbergungssteuer
Germany requires a Rechnung with the standard mentions plus the correct handling of Beherbergungssteuer (the accommodation tax charged by many Länder and cities — Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne all charge it, though the rate and exemption rules differ). Business travellers are typically exempt with the correct paperwork; leisure travellers pay the tax. Fiscal Composer prompts the front desk to capture the exemption declaration at check-in when a corporate rate is booked; the resulting invoice reflects the correct treatment.
VAT: 7% on accommodation, 19% on ancillaries and breakfast (breakfast is a common trap — a package rate must break out the breakfast portion at 19%). Fiscal Composer applies the split automatically when the rate plan is tagged as a package inside SiteMinder.
Spain — factura and IVA reducido
Spain applies IVA reducido at 10% on accommodation, breakfast, and half-board rates. Ancillaries are at 21% (IVA general). Some autonomous communities charge a separate impuesto sobre estancias turísticas (IEAT) — Catalonia and the Balearic Islands are the two most active. Fiscal Composer captures the IEAT as a separate line where applicable and prints the invoice in Spanish or Catalan depending on the property setting.
Spanish invoicing does not yet mandate an electronic clearing house equivalent to Italy's SdI for hotel B2C, but a national e-invoicing mandate is expected to phase in over 2027. Fiscal Composer already stores invoices in a structured format that will be compatible when the mandate lands.
Activation sequence at your property
The Hotelminder advisor will activate one country at a time. Roughly five working days per country: two for the property profile setup (legal identifiers, VAT numbers, imposta or IEAT rates, folio format), one for the connection to the country's tax authority endpoint where applicable (SdI for Italy, no endpoint for France or Spain today), and two for a shadow-invoicing period where the module issues invoices in parallel to your current process and your accountant compares. Once the shadow week is clean, we cut over.