Practical guides, how-tos and comparisons to get the most out of our free online tools.
Two regimes get merged into one paragraph everywhere, and they behave nothing alike. Selling a service to a business abroad and selling to a private customer abroad are governed by different articles, different thresholds and different filings. Here is the split, with the current figures.
Camille Laurent · 15 min read
The 183-day rule is the most repeated and least understood sentence in cross-border work. It comes from one article of one model treaty, it has three conditions and not one, and it decides nothing at all about social security, payroll or your employer's exposure. Here is what each rule actually tests.
Camille Laurent · 16 min read
A Markdown table has exactly two forbidden characters in a cell: the pipe and the line break. Here is what each one does, how a converter handles them, why the escape has to be applied in the right order, and why padding never matters.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
Net sales divided by net fixed assets is one of the easiest ratios to compute and one of the least comparable. The same retailer scored 10× before the lease standard and 1.39× after it — same shops, same sales, same year.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
Since June 2026 a French rooftop is paid 1.1 cents for an exported kilowatt-hour and avoids 25.61 cents by consuming the same one. That ratio of 23 to 1 makes the self-consumption rate — the variable almost every quote omits — worth more than the amount of sun falling on the roof.
Marco Bianchi · 11 min read
France caps the total cost of a mortgage at one third above the market average, insurance included. Portugal caps the monthly repayment at a share of net income — and on 1 August 2026 it cut that share from 50 % to 45 %. Neither ceiling means what the headline percentage suggests.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
Return on assets, return on net assets and return on capital employed are one family with two moving parts. On the same balance sheet they read 8.3%, 10.2% and 15.6% — and the two steps between them are exactly the two decisions you are making.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
Before any grant, the price of electricity divided by the price of gas sets a seasonal efficiency the heat pump must beat just to break even on running cost. In late 2025 that number was 1.53 in Portugal and 2.79 in Germany — and on old radiators a German heat pump can cost more to run than the boiler it replaced.
Marco Bianchi · 11 min read
Most of what buyers call the notary's fee is transfer tax, and it is fixed by a department, an autonomous community or a national scale. The genuinely negotiable share is small, and knowing which line it is on is worth more than haggling over the rest. Portugal added a flat 7.5 % rate for non-resident buyers in May 2026.
Marco Bianchi · 12 min read
The percentages written into the deed decide who owns what for as long as the property exists — not who paid the deposit, not who pays the mortgage, not who does the renovation. In France, Spain and Italy the default is the same undivided co-ownership, and it comes with a right that surprises couples: either of you can force a sale.
Marco Bianchi · 11 min read
Why the reader's language decides the delimiter, what the converter does to the quoting when you switch, what the sep= first line really is, and the count of quoted cells on the same export written five ways.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
The heating bill is real and it is small — about a fifteenth of the fuel a car commuter stops burning. The balance only goes negative in three identifiable cases, and one of them is a season ticket. Priced from Eurostat energy data, with the German tax system pushing the other way.
Camille Laurent · 17 min read