English-speaking French accountant for refurbished phone and IT resellers: VAT margin scheme, separation of streams, register of second-hand goods, private copying levy and customer trade-ins.
An accountant for refurbished tech secures the VAT margin scheme, separates new, second-hand and repair streams in the till, sets up the register of movable objects required by the French Criminal Code, and computes real margin after refurbishment cost and scrap. The goal: knowing which model actually makes money.
Quick answer. An accountant specialising in refurbished tech secures the VAT margin scheme, separates new, second-hand and repair streams in the till, sets up the register of movable objects required by the French Criminal Code, and computes real margin after refurbishment cost and scrap. They also price the private copying levy due on refurbished products. From 258 EUR excluding VAT per month, quote within 24 to 48 working hours.
It is an accountant who has understood that this trade cannot be read like ordinary retail, for one simple reason: value is not created at purchase, it is created between the buy-back and the resale.
A device often enters with no deductible VAT, because it comes from a private individual. It then incurs a refurbishment cost that varies by model, and a share of the devices bought back will never return to sale. It finally leaves under a specific VAT regime where tax applies to the margin rather than to the price. Three features which, together, make a refurbisher's profit and loss account unreadable until the bookkeeping has been built for this model.
On top sit two obligations most operators in the sector discover late: a register derived from the Criminal Code and a private copying levy applicable to refurbished products.
When a shop buys a phone back from a private individual, that individual charges no VAT. The shop therefore bears no deductible VAT on that entry. If it then had to charge VAT on the full resale price, the tax would hit a second time a value already taxed at origin. That is precisely what the margin scheme avoids: VAT is computed on the difference between the selling price and the purchase price.
The economic effect is considerable and explains the viability of the model. On a device bought back at 120 EUR and resold at 200 EUR, the taxable base is not 200 EUR but 80 EUR.
The scheme assumes the item is resold as is or after repair without substantial transformation. Refurbishment in the ordinary trade sense falls within that definition: diagnosis, cleaning, battery or screen replacement, data wiping and software reinstallation, testing and reconditioning.
The limit lies where the work no longer restores an existing item but manufactures a new one. In practice the point to watch is the ratio between the value of the parts incorporated and the value of the device itself: the higher it climbs, the more debatable the qualification becomes. This is settled upfront, model by model, not during an audit.
This is where most files deteriorate, and the mistake is always the same: treating the margin scheme as a month-end computation when it is a data entry architecture.
Refurbisher bookkeeping that holds up rests on three separations, effective from the point of payment:
Without this, the taxable base can no longer be reconstructed with certainty, and the error repeats at every filing until it becomes a liability.
Article 321-7 of the French Criminal Code requires a register of movable objects to be kept day by day by any professional whose activity involves, even for a small proportion of transactions, the sale or exchange of second-hand goods, or of goods acquired from persons who are neither their manufacturer nor their trader. Article 321-8 penalises inaccurate entries and refusal to produce the register to the competent authority, while articles R. 321-3 et seq. set its content and procedures, article R. 321-1 governing the prior declaration.
The French Directorate General for Enterprise states that the obligation is not limited to antique dealers and brokers: it covers any professional dealing in second-hand goods, in any sector. Failure to keep it is punishable by six months' imprisonment and a 30,000 EUR fine.
The register should be seen for what it really is: beyond criminal compliance, it is the evidence of provenance of your devices. That is exactly what an inspector asks for before accepting the margin scheme. The register and tax security are the same document seen from two angles.
Buying back from a private individual is the founding transaction of the model, and it is also the worst-equipped process in most shops we take on. It serves three purposes at once, and a well-designed buy-back form covers all three in a single document.
It feeds the register. The entries required by the Criminal Code are collected at the counter, not reconstructed the next day: the seller's identity taken from an official document, a description identifying the device unambiguously including its serial number or IMEI, the date of the transaction and the price paid.
It underpins the VAT position. The purchase price on the form is the one that will serve as the basis for computing the margin on resale. If it is approximate, so is the taxable base. And if provenance cannot be established, it is the regime itself that becomes contestable.
It protects the shop. A device bought back may be stolen, remotely blocked, or tied to an account that was never deactivated. The procedure is worth extending with a blocking check before payment and a statement in which the seller confirms owning the device and having unlinked it from their accounts.
Three requirements, one document. This is one of the rare places where compliance and operations point in exactly the same direction: the buy-back form that protects you legally is also the one that produces the reliable purchase price your accounts need.
This is one of the most widespread confusions in the sector, and it circulates even in professional content.
The French tax code provides no domestic reverse charge for supplies of mobile phones, tablets, laptops or consoles between taxable persons established in France, whereas several other EU Member States made that choice to fight carousel fraud.
The domestic reverse-charge cases set out in article 283 cover something else:
| Provision | What it actually covers |
|---|---|
| Article 283, 2 sexies | New industrial waste and recovered materials |
| Article 283, 2 octies | Electronic communication services, notably prepaid minutes and top-ups |
| Article 283, 2 nonies | Construction work on immovable property carried out by a subcontractor for a taxable customer |
The confusion often comes from 2 octies, which does mention telephony, but concerns electronic communication services rather than the supply of the handsets themselves. A shop reselling prepaid top-ups to other businesses may therefore be caught by that case; the same shop selling handsets to a business is not.
The stakes are concrete: invoicing without VAT by invoking a reverse charge that does not exist means failing to collect a tax that is due, with the assessment and penalties that follow. Conversely, ignoring 2 octies when you do sell top-ups to businesses exposes you to the mirror criticism.
These references move to the code des impositions sur les biens et services with no change of substance, on a date that has been pushed back (see below).
This is a direct charge on margin, and it is regularly discovered after the fact.
Law no. 2021-1485 of 15 November 2021 extended the private copying levy to refurbished devices. The applicable scale had a turbulent judicial history: decision no. 22 of the Private Copying Commission was annulled by the Conseil d'État on 19 December 2022, and decision no. 23 was adopted on 12 January 2023 for the same purpose.
The principle retained is a specific scale, reduced compared with new devices, reflecting that these products already bore the levy when first placed on the market.
For a refurbisher there are two practical consequences. The first is budgetary: the levy must enter the unit cost calculation alongside parts, failing which reported margin is overstated on every device. The second is procedural: the amount depends on the product category and its storage capacity, and the scale in force must be checked as at the placing-on-market date.
The most common model runs three activities in the same outlet. They do not follow the same rules.
| Activity | VAT regime | Taxable base |
|---|---|---|
| Sale of new devices and accessories | Ordinary regime | Full selling price |
| Sale of devices bought from individuals | Margin scheme | Margin realised |
| Repair invoiced to the customer | Supply of services | Price of the service |
The difficulty is not legal, it is operational: the till has to know, at the moment of payment, which family the transaction belongs to. A shop that settles this configuration at opening will never meet the problem; a shop that settles it after three years will have to reconstruct three financial years.
A refurbished tech shop almost always sells online too, often on specialist marketplaces. We hold a simple and useful boundary.
The nature of the goods belongs to this page: provenance and traceability of devices, margin scheme, register, warranty, stock valuation. Channel mechanics belong to our marketplaces page: settlement reports, commissions, remote stock, distance-selling VAT. The margin mechanism itself is detailed in our guide to the VAT margin scheme on second-hand goods.
| Indicator | Formula | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Unit margin after refurbishment | Selling price - buy-back price - refurbishment cost | The only real measure of profitability |
| Refurbishment cost per device | (Parts + labour) / devices returned to sale | The silent drift of difficult models |
| Scrap rate | Devices discarded / devices bought back | The quality of the buy-back policy |
| Device stock rotation | Cost of devices sold / average stock | The depreciation suffered while held |
| Warranty return rate | Returns accepted / sales for the period | A future cost to provision |
| Share of revenue under margin scheme | Margin-scheme revenue / total revenue | Real exposure to the special regime |
Rotation deserves particular attention in this trade: a model's value falls every month it sits on the shelf, regardless of its condition. Idle stock is not only frozen cash, it is a running write-down.
Ordinance no. 2025-1247 of 17 December 2025 transfers VAT rules from the general tax code to the code des impositions sur les biens et services. The recodification is made on a constant-law basis: the margin scheme is unchanged.
Watch the date, it changed recently. Entry into force of Book II of the CIBS was set for 1 September 2026. Ordinance no. 2026-671 of 27 July 2026 postponed it to 1 January 2027, notably to avoid it coinciding with the start of mandatory e-invoicing on 1 September 2026. Much of the content published before the summer still states the old date.
What changes are the references. A second-hand reseller almost always cites a general tax code article on its invoices to justify the absence of visible VAT. Those references will have to point to the new text. Former references remain admissible until 30 June 2028, a date also pushed back by the July 2026 ordinance, which leaves time to do it properly, provided you have identified where they appear: invoices, terms and conditions, POS configuration and buy-back forms.
Situation. A phone shop turns over 500,000 EUR net: sales of new devices and accessories, buy-back and resale of refurbished devices, and invoiced repairs. The owner sees revenue growing while cash does not follow, and cannot say which activity actually makes money.
What bringing it under control reveals. The three activities fell into the same till family, which made the margin-scheme VAT base impossible to reconstruct. Refurbishment cost was tracked nowhere: it was buried in parts purchases, so that some models were resold at a loss once refurbishment was accounted for. Scrap rate was not measured. The register of movable objects did not exist.
What is put in place. Separation of the three families at the point of payment and a rebuild of purchase and sales accounts; opening of the register and a buy-back procedure recording identity and price; computation of a unit margin after refurbishment by model; inclusion of the private copying levy in unit cost; an audit of invoice wording ahead of the CIBS deadline. The owner then sets buy-back policy on real margins rather than on selling prices.
The figures above are modelled for illustration and do not reproduce any client file.
No fixed package: a complete service from 258 EUR excluding VAT per month, adjusted case by case to your actual volumes. On this type of file the budget drivers are very identifiable: the volume of trade-ins to trace, the number of sales channels, the coexistence of several VAT regimes in one till, payslips, and whether repair is invoiced. Firm quote within 24 to 48 working hours.
✅ One contact, registered with the French Order of Chartered Accountants. Samuel Hayot, chartered accountant and statutory auditor, handles your file personally.
✅ A trade treated for what it is. Margin scheme, register, private copying levy and three regimes coexisting in one till: framed at the outset, not discovered in an audit.
✅ Accounts that give the real margin, after buy-back, refurbishment and scrap, model by model.
✅ Responsiveness. An answer within 24 to 48 working hours, by email or on the firm's direct WhatsApp line.
✅ Transparent pricing. From 258 EUR excluding VAT per month, adjusted to your actual volumes, firm quote within 24 to 48 working hours.
Hayot Expertise, 58 rue de Monceau, 75008 Paris. Phone and WhatsApp: +33 6 51 47 43 92. First scoping call with no commitment, firm quote within 24 to 48 working hours.
Selling price - buy-back price - refurbishment cost
(Parts + labour) / devices returned to sale
Devices discarded / devices bought back
Cost of devices sold / average stock
Returns accepted / sales for the period
Margin-scheme revenue / total revenue
Refurbished device retail is a retail business whose accounting resembles no other, because value is created between the buy-back and the resale rather than on a conventional trading margin. A device often enters with no deductible VAT, incurs a variable refurbishment cost and sometimes ends up scrapped, then leaves under a specific VAT regime. Add a register obligation from the Criminal Code, a private copying levy on refurbished products, and the frequent coexistence of several VAT regimes in a single point of sale.
We classify inbound devices by origin: bought from a private individual, bought from a business with VAT, bought from a business under the margin scheme. The purchase invoice, and it alone, determines the VAT regime of the resale. Everything else follows from that qualification.
We set up the register of movable objects required by the Criminal Code, with the expected entries on the way in and on the way out. Beyond criminal compliance, it is the document evidencing device provenance and securing the margin scheme.
We configure the point of sale and the invoicing so that new devices, margin-scheme refurbished sales and invoiced repairs fall into distinct families. An exact taxable base is built at the point of payment, not at filing time.
We isolate parts, labour and scrap per device or per batch, to obtain a unit margin after refurbishment. Without that figure, a shop can grow in volume while losing money on specific models.
We check the private copying levy applicable to refurbished products and the electrical and electronic equipment stream obligations, then update invoice wording ahead of the switch from the general tax code to the CIBS, postponed to 1 January 2027 by the ordinance of 27 July 2026.
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Samuel Hayot is a French chartered accountant and statutory auditor registered with the Paris professional bodies.
The firm is based in Paris 8 and operates with a delivery model designed for businesses located across France.
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Six months' imprisonment and a 30,000 EUR fine, and the obligation is not limited to antique dealers. Who must keep a register of second-hand movable objects, what it must contain, and why it also secures your VAT position.
The margin scheme allows French VAT to be applied only on the difference between selling price and purchase price of second-hand goods. Conditions, calculation, reporting obligations and risks in 2026.
In principle yes, where the device was acquired from a person who could not charge VAT, typically a private individual, and is resold as is or after repair without substantial transformation. VAT then applies to the margin alone, that is the difference between the selling price and the purchase price, rather than to the full selling price. Refurbishment in the ordinary trade sense, cleaning, battery or screen replacement, testing and software reconditioning, remains repair. The qualification is lost if the work results in a genuinely new product.
No, and this is a very widespread confusion. The French tax code provides no domestic reverse charge for supplies of mobile phones, tablets, laptops or consoles between taxable persons established in France, whereas several other EU Member States made that choice. The closest French domestic reverse-charge cases cover something else: article 283, 2 sexies covers new industrial waste and recovered materials, 2 octies covers electronic communication services, notably prepaid minutes and top-ups, and 2 nonies covers construction work subcontracted on immovable property. Invoicing without VAT on the basis of a reverse charge that does not exist means failing to collect a tax that is due.
Yes. Article 321-7 of the French Criminal Code requires a register of movable objects to be kept day by day by any professional whose activity involves, even for a small share of transactions, the sale or exchange of second-hand goods or of goods acquired from persons who are neither their manufacturer nor their trader. Article 321-8 penalises inaccurate entries and refusal to produce the register, and articles R. 321-3 et seq. set its content. The French Directorate General for Enterprise confirms the obligation goes far beyond antique dealers and covers any second-hand professional in any sector. Failure to keep it is punishable by six months' imprisonment and a 30,000 EUR fine. The register is also your evidence of provenance, and therefore the foundation of your VAT position.
Yes. Law no. 2021-1485 of 15 November 2021 extended the private copying levy to refurbished devices. The applicable scale had a turbulent history: decision no. 22 of the Private Copying Commission was annulled by the Conseil d'État on 19 December 2022, and decision no. 23 was adopted on 12 January 2023 for the same purpose. The principle retained is a specific scale, reduced compared with new devices, reflecting that these products already bore the levy when first placed on the market. It is a direct charge on margin, often discovered after the fact: we price it on your actual volumes and check the scale in force at your placing-on-market date.
By treating them as two distinct activities from the moment of entry, not at filing time. In practice: separate purchase accounts for acquisitions carrying no deductible VAT, separate sales accounts for margin-scheme sales, and a POS or invoicing configuration that assigns each transaction to the right family automatically. Without that separation at source, an exact taxable base can no longer be reconstructed, and the error repeats at every filing. It is the first thing we fix on a refurbished file.
Yes, and it is the most common model. But it makes two VAT regimes coexist in the same till: the ordinary regime on new devices and accessories, with deductible VAT on purchase and VAT charged on the full price, and the margin scheme on devices bought from private individuals. Repair invoiced to a customer is a third thing: a supply of services taxable at the standard rate. Three streams, one point of sale: the difficulty is not legal, it is configuration.
Ordinance no. 2025-1247 of 17 December 2025 transfers VAT rules from the general tax code to the code des impositions sur les biens et services. Watch the date: entry into force was set for 1 September 2026, but ordinance no. 2026-671 of 27 July 2026 postponed it to 1 January 2027, to avoid it coinciding with the start of mandatory e-invoicing. The recodification is made on a constant-law basis: the margin scheme is unchanged. But a second-hand reseller almost always cites a general tax code article on its invoices to justify the absence of visible VAT, and those references will have to point to the new text. Former references remain admissible until 30 June 2028, a date also pushed back by the July 2026 ordinance. We audit your invoice wording and your configuration before the deadline.
It depends entirely on what their invoice shows. If the supplier charges you deductible VAT, you are in the ordinary regime and your resale is taxed on the full price. If the supplier itself sells under the margin scheme, its invoice shows no VAT and you can deduct nothing: your own resale then falls under the margin scheme. The purchase invoice is therefore the document that determines the regime of the resale, which is why it must be filed and legible, not merely archived.
We handle everything that flows from the nature of the goods: margin scheme, traceability of trade-ins, register, warranty, device stock valuation. Platform mechanics, meaning settlement reports, commissions, remote stock and distance-selling VAT, are handled on our marketplaces page, which is more precise on that. A shop that also sells online does not need two firms; it needs each topic handled where it is best mastered.
Five to begin with. Average unit margin after refurbishment cost, the only true measure of profitability and one the selling price alone never gives. Refurbishment cost per device, parts and labour. Scrap rate, meaning the share of devices bought back that will never return to sale. Device stock rotation, because a model's value falls every month it sits on the shelf. And warranty return rate, which is a future cost to provision rather than an isolated incident.
There is no fixed package: a complete monthly service from 258 EUR excluding VAT, adjusted case by case to your actual volumes. On this type of file the budget drivers are very identifiable: the volume of trade-ins to trace, the number of sales channels, the coexistence of several VAT regimes in one till, payslips, and whether repair is invoiced. Firm quote within 24 to 48 working hours after a scoping call.
Applying the margin scheme without being able to evidence its conditions. The French tax authorities publish a fraud awareness note devoted specifically to the VAT margin scheme and second-hand goods, which says enough about how closely it is watched. In an audit the question is never theoretical: it concerns the evidence of provenance of each device and the purchase price used to compute the margin. A properly kept register and consistent purchase invoices are worth more than any legal argument.
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