VAT on a Czech receipt: what a daňový doklad must contain

If you are VAT registered in Czechia, the piece of paper you hand over is not a receipt, it is a tax document, and the law is specific about what has to be on it. The good news is that the list is short and the hardest part is not legal at all, it is making the arithmetic in the tax summary agree with the total.

Updated 3 August 2026 · about 6 minutes

Simplified or full: which document are you writing

Czech VAT law recognises a zjednodušený daňový doklad, a simplified tax document, for small transactions. The threshold is 10 000 CZK including VAT. Under that, and paid on the spot, a till receipt is enough. Over it, or whenever the customer wants to reclaim the VAT and asks for their details on it, you owe them a full tax document.

The practical difference is who appears on the paper:

Because a simplified document may leave the VAT amount off, plenty of till receipts show only the gross total and the rate. Print the tax summary anyway. It costs three lines, it makes the receipt usable as evidence, and it saves you reissuing documents for customers who want to expense the coffee.

The rates

Since the 2024 rate consolidation there are two rates plus a zero rate. The previous 15% and 10% reduced rates were merged into a single 12%.

• 21%, the standard rate, for most goods and services.
• 12%, the reduced rate, covering food, water, heating, accommodation, catering, public transport, medicines and similar.
• 0% on books, including e-books and audiobooks.

A receipt can mix rates freely. A restaurant bill routinely carries 12% on the food and 21% on the alcohol, and that is exactly the case where the tax summary earns its place, because the customer cannot derive it from the total.

The rounding rule that decides whether it adds up

This is where most homemade receipts fall over. You have two plausible orders of operations and they give different answers:

1. Compute the tax on each line, round each one, then add the rounded amounts.
2. Add the unrounded lines, then compute and round the tax once at the end.

On a receipt, use the first. The reason is not mathematical purity, it is that the customer can see the individual lines. If each printed line says 2.10 and the summary says the tax was 6.28 rather than 6.30, the receipt looks wrong, and "looks wrong" is what generates the phone call.

Worked example, three items at 21% with prices including VAT:

Line          Gross     Net      VAT
Coffee        59.00     48.76    10.24
Croissant     45.00     37.19     7.81
Water         25.00     20.66     4.34
                     -------  -------
Subtotal             106.61    22.39
Total gross                   129.00

Each net is gross ÷ 1.21 rounded to two decimals, each VAT is the remainder, and the summary sums the rounded numbers. Every column adds up to what is printed under it, which is the only test a receipt actually has to pass.

Rounding the cash total

Czech cash payments are commonly rounded to the whole crown, since the 1 and 2 heller coins no longer exist. Handle that rounding as its own line at the very bottom, after the tax summary, and keep it out of the tax base. Show it explicitly, labelled, so the customer can see why 129.40 became 129.00. Card payments are normally taken unrounded.

What about EET

Elektronická evidence tržeb was ended for good at the start of 2023. There is no obligation to send sales to the tax office in real time and no FIK or BKP code to print on the receipt. If you are copying an old template, delete those fields. Some point of sale software still prints them out of habit and it just confuses people.

Numbering

Document numbers must be unique and, in practice, unbroken. Pick a scheme with the year in it, for example 2026-000141 or R26-0141, and never reuse a number even for a cancelled sale. If you void a transaction, issue a credit note (opravný daňový doklad) that references the original number rather than deleting anything. An audit is not looking for perfection, it is looking for a trail.

Adding a payment QR code

On an invoice, a QR Platba code saves the customer typing your account number and cuts the number of payments that arrive with the wrong variable symbol. It is one extra block on the page and every Czech banking app reads it. See the QR Platba guide for the string format.

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