Long-term Assets (Imobilizado) for Freelancers on the Simplified Regime

I bought a laptop for my freelance business and put it through my business expenses. When I came to file the IVA Periódica, I was not sure whether it went in field #20 or one of the other acquisition fields. I also had no idea what a Ficha de Imobilizado was, or whether I needed one.

Most guides for freelancers either skip this topic entirely or dive straight into the accounting theory. What I actually wanted to know was simpler: does any of this change anything about my taxes, what evidence do I keep, and what is the minimum I need to do to stay clean?

This is that post. It covers the decisions you make before and after the purchase, not the definition (that is at /glossary/imobilizado) and not the IVA Periódica mechanics (those are at /guides/imobilizado-iva-periodica).

Two systems running in parallel

When you buy a business asset on the simplified regime, two separate tax systems are involved, and they work independently of each other.

IRS side: the asset purchase changes nothing. Under the simplified regime, your taxable income is a coefficient applied to gross revenue, specifically 0.75 for most service providers covered by Article 151 CIRS. Your actual expenses, including what you paid for equipment, do not enter the calculation. The laptop does not reduce your IRS.

VAT side: you can still recover input VAT. Even under the simplified regime, if you are registered for VAT, you recover the VAT paid on business assets through the IVA Periódica. For a €1,200 laptop (pre-VAT), that is €276 in VAT (23%) you claim back in the quarter you made the purchase. That goes in field #20 of the declaration.

The two systems do not talk to each other. A lot of freelancers assume that if the asset does not affect IRS it does not affect anything else either, and skip the IVA Periódica step. That is the mistake.

One caveat: if you are under the Art. 53 VAT exemption (under €15,000 revenue), you cannot recover input VAT at all. The exemption cuts both ways: no VAT on invoices, and no VAT recovery on purchases either.

What to think about before buying

Which quarter? The VAT credit lands in the quarter the invoice is dated. If you are at the end of Q2 and you have an outstanding VAT credit already sitting in #94 from Q1 and Q2, adding a large asset in Q2 increases the credit but it will not be refundable until year-end for quarterly filers. If you prefer to spread the accounting load, or if a Q3 purchase fits a planned project better, there is no IRS disadvantage to waiting.

Mixed use. A laptop you use 90% for work and 10% for personal use is a mixed-use asset. AT's position is that you deduct only the business proportion of VAT (90% in this example). In practice, most freelancers with a single work machine that sits on their desk do not segment this. But the rule exists, and a clearly personal device registered as a business asset creates a risk in an inspection.

Pre-VAT cost vs. total cost. The €1,000 threshold that determines whether the asset goes in field #20 is the pre-VAT (base tributável) cost, not the total invoice value. A laptop invoiced at €1,230 with €230 VAT has a base tributável of €1,000. It sits right on the boundary. Check the invoice breakdown, not the total.

What evidence to keep

The document chain for a business asset is the same as for any other deductible expense, with one difference: you keep it longer.

• The original invoice (or a qualified digital scan per DL 28/2019), with your NIF as the buyer
• The payment proof (bank transfer confirmation)
• For assets above €1,000: the Ficha de Imobilizado entry (see below)

Portugal's document retention obligation is 10 years from the end of the civil year of the transaction, not 4 years. The 4-year figure widely cited is the AT's assessment window (caducidade), the period during which AT can challenge a filing. The documents themselves have to exist for 10 years. A laptop bought in March 2026 needs its invoice kept until 31 December 2036.

The Ficha de Imobilizado

The Ficha de Imobilizado is an asset register. For a large company it is a formal accounting document. For a freelancer with three items in it, it can be a simple table.

AT does not publish an official template. Here is the minimum version you need for a simplified-regime freelancer:

Asset	Acquisition date	Supplier	Base tributável (pre-VAT)	Expected useful life
Laptop (MacBook Air M3)	2026-03-15	Apple Distribution International	€1,500	5 years
External monitor	2025-11-20	Backmarket	€180	5 years
Desk (IKEA Bekant)	2025-06-01	IKEA Portugal	€319	10 years

That is the whole thing. Add a row when you buy something. Keep the table alongside the corresponding invoices. If AT asks for your asset register during an inspection, this is what you hand them.

A few notes on the columns:

Base tributável: the pre-VAT cost. This is what determines whether an asset goes in field #20 (above €1,000) or the general fields (#22/#23/#24) on the IVA Periódica.

Expected useful life: AT publishes standard useful life guidelines by asset category (Decreto Regulamentar 25/2009). Common ones: computers and software at 3-4 years, office furniture at 5-10 years, vehicles at 4-5 years. For your asset register, a reasonable estimate is fine. The useful life affects depreciation calculations, which matter for organized accounting (contabilidade organizada) but not for simplified-regime IRS.

Assets below €1,000: you still add them to the register if they are genuinely long-term business assets. The €1,000 threshold affects IVA Periódica routing, not whether something counts as imobilizado.

The regularization risk in plain terms

When you deduct VAT on an asset, AT reserves the right to ask for part of it back if your activity changes in the next few years. The adjustment window is 5 years for movable assets (computers, equipment, vehicles) and 20 years for real estate.

The mechanism is called regularization (regularização), and it only fires in one scenario: you start doing both VAT-taxable and VAT-exempt services in subsequent years (mixed activity). For example, if you start teaching a VAT-exempt evening course alongside your regular consultancy work, AT would recalculate how much of the laptop's original VAT recovery you were actually entitled to.

For a freelancer with fully taxable services and no change in activity, the regularization clock exists but never fires. Your laptop deduction is not going to come back to haunt you unless you change what you do.

If you are planning to pivot your activity or add exempt services, talk to your contabilista certificado before the purchase. That is genuinely a question for an accountant.

Common mistakes

Putting the total invoice amount in field #20 instead of the base tributável. The field expects the pre-VAT cost. If your invoice is €1,476 (€1,200 + €276 VAT), you enter €1,200 in the base tributável column, not €1,476.

Classifying inventory as imobilizado. If you sell goods (a reseller, a craft seller), the stock you hold for sale is inventário, not imobilizado. It goes in different fields and is treated differently. The test: are you keeping this thing to use in the business, or are you keeping it to sell?

Missing the €1,000 threshold and putting an above-threshold asset in the wrong field. Field #20 is for imobilizado above €1,000. Below that threshold, the asset goes in fields #22/#23/#24 with regular acquisitions. Misrouting does not change the total VAT amount but creates an inconsistency AT can flag.

No invoice in the business name. An asset purchased personally (invoice to your private name, without NIF) cannot be claimed as a business expense. If you bought the laptop on a personal card, at minimum make sure your NIF is on the invoice. If the seller did not include it, request a corrected invoice (nota de crédito or rectified document) before the quarter closes.

Skipping the Ficha de Imobilizado. AT does not proactively ask for this on every filing, but it can. If you have been filing field #20 for three years and cannot produce an asset register when asked, that is an exposure.

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For the definition of imobilizado and what counts and what does not, see /glossary/imobilizado. For the step-by-step on filling field #20 in the IVA Periódica, including the routing decision for above vs. below-threshold assets, see /guides/imobilizado-iva-periodica.

The eFatura guide covers how to verify that your asset invoices are correctly associated with your NIF in the AT system. Worth checking before you file, especially if the supplier is foreign and not automatically reporting to AT.

Every invoice you issue in Portugal carries a QR code that encodes your NIF and the document type. Understanding how that system works helps clarify why the AT can cross-reference your purchases against your supplier's issued invoices. The QR code explainer has the detail if you want it.