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The tax stuff is a bit of a pain, but you can buy things (eg Stripe plugins) to make collecting the necessary data much smoother. In short: If you're supplying

The tax stuff is a bit of a pain, but you can buy things (eg Stripe plugins) to make collecting the necessary data much smoother. In short: If you're supplying digital services to consumers, you need to charge them Value-Added Tax (VAT) in the country they're in, not the country you're in. If you're supplying to businesses, you charge them VAT where you are. You need to collect certain evidence with each transaction, to prove which category/country your customer is in. The search term you probably want is "VAT MOSS". This officially refers to the "Mini One-Stop Shop" provided by HMRC (the British tax authorities), which tries to ameliorate the situation. You still need to charge people the right amount of tax, but then you can just upload a quarterly spreadsheet saying how much revenue you got from each EU country. But "VAT MOSS" is also used as a catch-all term for the whole cross-border digital VAT kerfuffle. It started out as a well-intentioned attempt to close a tax loophole, but it was clearly drafted by people with no understanding of how computers work. (There are actually "FAQs" about how, precisely, to handle a German citizen with a British SIM card making a mobile transaction from a train journey crossing the Italian-Swiss border...as if this were something a website could reasonably detect.) But, as I say, there are decent solutions you can use, and you just spend a couple of days implementing one of them.

Silhouette 9y ago
But, as I say, there are decent solutions you can use, and you just spend a couple of days implementing one of them. A couple of days seems very optimistic! The situation today is certainly better than it was for those of us who got hit by the new rules before the payment services had caught up and had to do it all ourselves. However, even the payment services today typically concentrate on adding the correct VAT rate onto initial purchases and possibly doing some sort of look-up to try to keep the required proof of location. They still won't do much to help you keep up to date with different tax rates for different types of service or in different territories, filing (and, if necessary, later re-filing) the MOSS returns themselves, knowing which location and therefore which tax rate to use for later payments after a customer starts an automatic recurring subscription of some kind, and so on. And of course it's all relatively simple if you collect all your payments through the same payment method, such as Stripe and a plugin as you mentioned. If you're collecting through different channels then you're still going to have to reconcile all the figures yourself as well, at least with any payment systems I've ever seen.
SolarNet 9y ago
> as if this were something a website could reasonably detect. Do you not record your users' GPS, connection point, roundtrip delay, microphone, and camera at all times? Because I stepped into a restaurant the other day and my brand new Android phone asked me to take a picture of the specific booth I had sat down in (by number and floor plan) for Google. Get with the modern analytics stack bro.
scoot 9y ago
> ameliorate the situation You could probably ameliorate that by changing it to "improve".
- meredydd 9y ago
  I intended the connotation of the word I used. It feels like the MOSS scheme's heart is in the right place, but the best they can do is make a bad situation suck a little less, and "ameliorate" is about as polite as I felt like being. (While I'm making a new comment, and since the last one is out of its edit window, I should acknowledge I mangled my attempt to summarise the place-of-supply rules. Sorry. Don't get your tax advice from HN comments, kids.)

Silhouette 9y ago

But, as I say, there are decent solutions you can use, and you just spend a couple of days implementing one of them. A couple of days seems very optimistic! The situation today is certainly better than it was for those of us who got hit by the new rules before the payment services had caught up and had to do it all ourselves. However, even the payment services today typically concentrate on adding the correct VAT rate onto initial purchases and possibly doing some sort of look-up to try to keep the required proof of location. They still won't do much to help you keep up to date with different tax rates for different types of service or in different territories, filing (and, if necessary, later re-filing) the MOSS returns themselves, knowing which location and therefore which tax rate to use for later payments after a customer starts an automatic recurring subscription of some kind, and so on. And of course it's all relatively simple if you collect all your payments through the same payment method, such as Stripe and a plugin as you mentioned. If you're collecting through different channels then you're still going to have to reconcile all the figures yourself as well, at least with any payment systems I've ever seen.

SolarNet 9y ago

> as if this were something a website could reasonably detect. Do you not record your users' GPS, connection point, roundtrip delay, microphone, and camera at all times? Because I stepped into a restaurant the other day and my brand new Android phone asked me to take a picture of the specific booth I had sat down in (by number and floor plan) for Google. Get with the modern analytics stack bro.

scoot 9y ago

> ameliorate the situation You could probably ameliorate that by changing it to "improve".

meredydd 9y ago
I intended the connotation of the word I used. It feels like the MOSS scheme's heart is in the right place, but the best they can do is make a bad situation suck a little less, and "ameliorate" is about as polite as I felt like being. (While I'm making a new comment, and since the last one is out of its edit window, I should acknowledge I mangled my attempt to summarise the place-of-supply rules. Sorry. Don't get your tax advice from HN comments, kids.)