Four activities make a business a reporting platform operator, and personal services is broader than most operators assume. The excluded-seller thresholds have two limbs that both have to hold, and the data has to be collected at sign-up to be reportable by 31 January.
Who has to report, and about whom
DAC7 is the EU rule that makes digital platforms report their sellers to the tax authorities. Countries had to put it into national law by the end of 2022 and apply it from 1 January 2023, so the first reports were filed long ago. The question that still catches businesses out is whether they count as a platform at all.
What triggers it is one of four activities, carried out for payment:
renting out property — homes, commercial premises, any other immovable property, and parking spaces;
personal services;
selling goods;
renting out any kind of vehicle.
Work done by someone acting as an employee of the platform, or of a connected company, does not count. Everything else the platform facilitates for payment does.
The sellers who drop out
A seller is reportable if they are active, and are either resident in an EU country or renting out property located in one — unless they fall into one of the excluded groups. Four groups are excluded, and two of them are thresholds worth knowing:
government bodies, and listed companies or companies connected to them;
large property operators — where the platform handled more than 2,000 rentals for a single property listing in the period;
small goods sellers — fewer than 30 sales of goods, and no more than EUR 2,000 in total, in the period. Both have to be true: thirty-one small sales is reportable, and so is one sale of EUR 2,500.
The deadline, and the rule that stops double reporting
The report goes to the tax authority by 31 January of the year after the year in which you identified the seller as reportable. What you report is the payment net of the fees, commissions and taxes the platform itself withheld or charged.
Two rules save duplicated work. Where more than one platform operator is involved, one of them does not have to report if it holds proof, under national law, that the other already reported the same information. And an operator that meets the conditions in several countries picks one and reports there.
Both are only as good as the evidence behind them. The exemption depends on proof that someone else reported, not on an assumption that they probably did.
Why it matters beyond the filing
DAC7 data is exchanged between tax authorities automatically. For the platform it is an administrative duty. For the sellers on it, the practical effect is that income earned through the platform is visible to the tax authority where they live, whether or not they declared it.
Platforms usually discover this when sellers start asking what was reported about them. That is a conversation worth being ready for.
The checking is the platform's job too: identifying sellers, collecting and verifying the required information, and working out where they are resident. That makes it a product and onboarding question before it is a tax one — the data has to be collected at sign-up if it is going to be reportable in January.
What to check
Whether what your platform facilitates is one of the four activities. Personal services is broader than most operators assume.
Whether your onboarding actually collects what the rules require, rather than just what your payment provider needs.
Whether your excluded-seller logic tests both parts of the small-seller threshold.
If you operate in several countries, which one you chose to report in — and whether that choice is written down anywhere.
Registration duties, penalties and the mechanics of filing come from the Latvian law that implements this rather than from the EU text, and that is worth confirming locally.