It's quarter-end. You've got seventeen VAT returns to file, and each one needs exporting from your ledger, reformatting, and mapping to eCDF fields by hand.
That workflow has stayed manual longer than most of fund administration has moved inside the platform. Native eCDF integration in Entrilia changes it: VAT returns now generate directly from your ledger as eCDF-compliant XML, ready for upload to the portal.
What is eCDF?
Electronic Collection of Financial Data (eCDF) is Luxembourg's official government platform for the electronic filing of regulated financial data, including VAT returns and annual accounts. It is accessible at ecdf.lu and was introduced by the State Information Technology Centre (CTIE).
VAT filings submitted through eCDF are processed by the AED—Administration de l'enregistrement, des domaines et de la TVA (Registration Duties, Estates and VAT Authority)—the Luxembourg tax authority responsible for VAT.
Since January 2020, Luxembourg has mandated electronic filing for all VAT cycles: monthly, quarterly, and annual. While the portal technically allows for manual web forms, XML is the practical choice for fund administrators filing at volume.
Why Luxembourg VAT filings are a burden for fund administrators
Luxembourg is the dominant European domicile for private equity, venture capital, and alternative fund structures. If your book includes Luxembourg-domiciled entities, eCDF filings are a recurring monthly workload – one fund admin can carry dozens of client entities, each with its own VAT position, each requiring a stack of VAT returns, recapitulative statements, and appendices across monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles.
Much of that workflow has stayed manual and looks like this:
- Export VAT ledger from your accounting system
- Reformat in a spreadsheet to match eCDF field structure
- Map each figure to the right declaration line by hand
- Validate against eCDF rules (and catch rejections only on upload)
- Log into the portal, upload, repeat for the next entity
For a single fund, this is an afternoon of work. At thirty funds across a quarter-end, it's several days of it. The time is the visible cost. The less visible one is that field-mapping errors made in a spreadsheet don't get caught until the eCDF portal rejects the submission – often with the deadline already in sight.
How the eCDF integration works in Entrilia
VAT returns generate directly from your Entrilia VAT ledger as eCDF-compliant XML, ready to upload to the portal.
Agent and entity registration via a guided wizard
A guided setup handles the two registrations that eCDF requires: the agent (your firm, as the fund administrator) and each entity filed on behalf of (each fund). Each client entity is registered once on its entity card; the configuration applies to every return generated for that entity.
Automatic field mapping to eCDF validation rules
Field mappings initialise automatically, aligned to current eCDF validation rules. The setup wizard configures the current year by default; prior and future years can be initialised on demand.
Full declaration coverage for Luxembourg VAT filings
The integration supports every eCDF VAT declaration a Luxembourg fund administrator files. Whichever declaration type applies, the output is the same: an eCDF-compliant XML file, ready for upload to the portal.
Declaration types supported:
- Monthly VAT return
- Quarterly VAT return
- Annual VAT return
- Annual Simplified VAT return
- Monthly Recapitulative Statement (goods and services)
- Quarterly Recapitulative Statement (goods and services)
- Appendices: Acquisitions and Assets
In-platform preview and audit before XML generation
You review the full return inside Entrilia before the XML is generated – selecting the entity, the period, and the VAT statement, and drilling down from statement lines to the underlying amounts. No context switch or export-to-verify step.
The Luxembourg VAT filing workflow: Before and after native eCDF integration
The time saving matters. And the structural change matters even more: the filing is no longer a separate process running alongside the ledger. It is the ledger, formatted for eCDF.
How eCDF sits alongside HMRC and multi-jurisdictional compliance
eCDF integration sits alongside Entrilia's existing HMRC integration in the UK. For fund administrators running books across both jurisdictions, that means Luxembourg eCDF and UK HMRC filings coexist in one environment, with multi-book support keeping each entity's compliance position distinct.
This is the direction of Entrilia's broader approach to fund administration: eliminate the manual compliance overhead that compounds as the book scales. Every jurisdiction added to a fund admin's portfolio should add entities instead of another system to manage.
If Luxembourg VAT filings are a recurring line item on your quarter-end list, a short walkthrough is the fastest way to see whether this changes that →
