I get my kids to it. That’s about as much automation as I can get my head around.
Peter, could you elaborate on what are you trying to do?
Automating the fuel duty drawback
I’ve just spent some hours filling in 35 forms, covering past 2 years 
There is no obvious way to automate it unless one does OCR on the airport invoices.
I wonder if anyone else has tried? Commercial operators who use avgas (not so many of them, I know) must have a better system.
I reckon this may be temporary.
But when doing the drawback claim you have to remember to apply the different rates to different flights.
The avgas rate is now £0.3629 per litre since March 2022. It’s taken them 4 months to ask me to resubmit at the correct rate, so I would recommend getting it right the first time
Airborne_Again wrote:
I was thinking about the licensing business.
I know the licensing change is because of tax issues, with VAT being a primary driver – allegedly a lot of fraud was happening in the fuel business; the fact that the aeroclubs got caught in the crossfire – a club’s yearly turnover is way too low to attract any real crime.
Peter wrote:
Could a pump in Poland ever sell duty free fuel to a domestic noncommercial customer?
Duty free I do not know – that would be marginally applicable to GA given the geography (7h flights in a TB20 are not a common case 
); the fact that the avgas we sell is produced in Poland (by Warter, owned by Orlen) makes it even more of a strech; not sure it would even be possible to find the duty paid on crude oil and to find a way to write it off, since it’s been processed. Way beyond my pay grade.
I do know we sell avgas with and without excise tax, the difference is about 0.50 EUR per liter without VAT; to be allowed to not pay the excise tax the buyer must have a special tax form on file with us, we need to validate it is current with the tax authorities, or owe the tax due and a fine if it turns out not to be. We do not sell avgas without excise tax to businesses outside of Poland.
We always charge VAT, but do issue VAT invoices, so if one is so inclined and it works with their business accounting, they can write it off.
On a side note – we are looking into reclaiming the excise tax we pay in the car gas we burn in the Rotax powered planes we have, but at this time we simply pay it. Looking at excise tax for diesel engines used for glider winches and for the farm equipment we maintain the field with is next on our list. Once you look at all the liters purchased in a year, it does add up.
tmo wrote:
I don’t know; probably not, most tax systems have local variations, don’t they? I’m kind of glad nobody asked, because the EU would probably get blamed… Writing more would get political, so I’ll leave it at that.
I was thinking about the licensing business.
Could a pump in Poland ever sell duty free fuel to a domestic noncommercial customer?
Formal fuel drawback is possible only in the UK, and possibly Italy, AFAIK.
Isn’t this sort of thing harmonized with the EU?
Certainly the way with which getting duty free fuel at the pump has been comprehensively blocked in the last 10-15 years is probably just better organisation within the EU, and was to be expected. If you go back say 20+ years, you were dealing with some rather “3rd world” countries, which was nice while it lasted
