On 1 January 2007, Germany increased its standard rate of VAT by 3 percentage points from 16% to 19%. Both businesses and the VAT administration had to invest a lot of energy and resources in making the appropriate changes to their IT systems and procedures, in order to ensure (or enforce, as the case may be) that the correct transition principles were and are applied. In the article, the author discusses the basic time-of-supply principles and the effects of the increase in rate on, inter alia, advance payments and ongoing supplies.