The terminology is based around the traditional business model of physical goods. Buy stuff, put them together, sell the result. You reclaim the VAT on your pur

The terminology is based around the traditional business model of physical goods. Buy stuff, put them together, sell the result. You reclaim the VAT on your purchases, and charge VAT on your sales. Thus the net VAT you collect is on the "value added". But you collect and your customer pays the full (eg. 20%) on the full sale amount, since he's paying for the complete value added all the way down the supply chain. This is effectively the same as a sales tax; just the mechanism for collection is different. For service-orientated businesses, the mechanism is the same; the terminology just makes less direct sense. In general, a business still get to reclaim all the VAT it pays on stuff it buys, and must charge VAT on all the stuff it sells.