4 ms·

Show HN: Simplified EU VAT validation (for B2B sales)

3 points by davidklein 6y ago

davidklein 6y ago
Hi HackerNews, first time solopreneur here (if that is a word) and my very first launch of a product which I built alone, start to finish. Not sure what to expect. I am super pumped and excited to show Vatfy to the HackerNews community and am very nervous (and scared to death at the same time) of what you guys think of my niche product. I created Vatfy because I did not find a simple and cheap alternative to making my invoices tax compliant. Yes, there are other solutions out there that do VAT validations, but most just do this initially (one time) or are insanely expensive (at least for my gusto). This kind of sucks if you are invoicing on a monthly basis as a SaaS (for example). So I created Vatfy to validate EU VAT ID numbers, calculate prices for B2B and B2C customers based on their location and help me figure out if you want to invoice net or gross pricing (with and without VAT percentages), be able to look up up-to-date VAT rates as well as have a place to store all my validation evidence in case the local tax authority ever wants to do an audit. Also very unsure about pricing at the moment. 100 free validations per month is a lot, but I always had the small business user in mind, who cannot or does not want to purchase a more expensive solution. Any feedback to Vatfy more than welcome!
piterrro 6y ago
How is this different than VIES check apart from providing tax rates?
- davidklein 6y ago
  Hi piterrro, glad you asked. It's not really different in that regard, as it's the only official approach to validating EU VAT numbers programatically. With Vatfy I want to provide a solution that takes care of evidence storage of your validations, combined with location information, VAT rates as well as price calculations based on B2B/B2C pricing. So really having a solution to solve multiple use cases based around VAT number validation. Hope that makes sense?
  - piterrro 6y ago
    Thanks for the answer. I'm interested in this product. What sort of evidence are you providing? In case of tax authority audit what kind of evidence format I can present to them when using your tool? Also what is the data source that returns the name of the company? the "execution" property states very low numbers below 10ms but when I open network tab in devtools and check timing I see TTFB is about 500ms, what the "execution" time corresponds to? Is that the time taken to validate format and the rest of the time is spent on checking VIES database?
    - davidklein 6y ago
      Hi pitorrro, this will be a rather lengthy post. Sorry. I try to be brief. There are multiple angles to "evidence", depending on which perspective you take. First the "evidence" you need to prove you validated the VAT ID, the second is having proof that you have two pieces of customer location evidence to be "allowed" to reverse-charge invoices (and not charge VAT). What Vatfy provides is a unique evidence identifier that the European Commission assigns to each validation. This is what you can provide tax authorities with, which proves that you verified a specific VAT ID and at with what data, date, etc. This is stored in your Usage history in your Vatfy account. In addition to that, Vatfy stores the location data of your user together with that validation request. As a registered business within the European Union, you must collect two pieces of customer location evidence to comply with the European Union's tax laws. These can be either "the billing address", "the location of the customer’s bank", "the country which issued the credit card", "the IP address location of the customer’s device" or "the country of the SIM card (in cases where the purchase was made on a mobile device)" (https://vatfy.com/documentation#evidence https://vatfy.com/documentation#evidence) In addition to storing the evidence identifier provided by the European Commission, Vatfy provides the part of "the IP address location of the customer’s device". For your second piece of matching location data, your payment processor should, in most cases, be able to provide you either a "Location of the customer’s bank" or the "Country which issued the credit card". Or you can provide "The billing address of the customer" yourself. The execution time in the JSON response corresponds to the time it took to validate a VAT ID with the European Commission, store the results in the database and provide a JSON response. Or for calculations or VAT rates fetching it basically tells you the time everything needed to run and return a result. The time it took to send your data to Vatfy or the time it takes it for you to receive the result are not reflected in that timing. TTFB of 500ms seems long to be honest. May you share me your current location and if you ran your validation via API or through the dashboard? I would like to take a look and see if there is anything I can do to speed up the server to serve a faster TTFB.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

3 points by davidklein 6y ago

Hi HackerNews, first time solopreneur here (if that is a word) and my very first launch of a product which I built alone, start to finish. Not sure what to expect. I am super pumped and excited to show Vatfy to the HackerNews community and am very nervous (and scared to death at the same time) of what you guys think of my niche product. I created Vatfy because I did not find a simple and cheap alternative to making my invoices tax compliant. Yes, there are other solutions out there that do VAT validations, but most just do this initially (one time) or are insanely expensive (at least for my gusto). This kind of sucks if you are invoicing on a monthly basis as a SaaS (for example). So I created Vatfy to validate EU VAT ID numbers, calculate prices for B2B and B2C customers based on their location and help me figure out if you want to invoice net or gross pricing (with and without VAT percentages), be able to look up up-to-date VAT rates as well as have a place to store all my validation evidence in case the local tax authority ever wants to do an audit. Also very unsure about pricing at the moment. 100 free validations per month is a lot, but I always had the small business user in mind, who cannot or does not want to purchase a more expensive solution. Any feedback to Vatfy more than welcome!

piterrro 6y ago

How is this different than VIES check apart from providing tax rates?

davidklein 6y ago
Hi piterrro, glad you asked. It's not really different in that regard, as it's the only official approach to validating EU VAT numbers programatically. With Vatfy I want to provide a solution that takes care of evidence storage of your validations, combined with location information, VAT rates as well as price calculations based on B2B/B2C pricing. So really having a solution to solve multiple use cases based around VAT number validation. Hope that makes sense?
- piterrro 6y ago
  Thanks for the answer. I'm interested in this product. What sort of evidence are you providing? In case of tax authority audit what kind of evidence format I can present to them when using your tool? Also what is the data source that returns the name of the company? the "execution" property states very low numbers below 10ms but when I open network tab in devtools and check timing I see TTFB is about 500ms, what the "execution" time corresponds to? Is that the time taken to validate format and the rest of the time is spent on checking VIES database?
  - davidklein 6y ago
    Hi pitorrro, this will be a rather lengthy post. Sorry. I try to be brief. There are multiple angles to "evidence", depending on which perspective you take. First the "evidence" you need to prove you validated the VAT ID, the second is having proof that you have two pieces of customer location evidence to be "allowed" to reverse-charge invoices (and not charge VAT). What Vatfy provides is a unique evidence identifier that the European Commission assigns to each validation. This is what you can provide tax authorities with, which proves that you verified a specific VAT ID and at with what data, date, etc. This is stored in your Usage history in your Vatfy account. In addition to that, Vatfy stores the location data of your user together with that validation request. As a registered business within the European Union, you must collect two pieces of customer location evidence to comply with the European Union's tax laws. These can be either "the billing address", "the location of the customer’s bank", "the country which issued the credit card", "the IP address location of the customer’s device" or "the country of the SIM card (in cases where the purchase was made on a mobile device)" (https://vatfy.com/documentation#evidence https://vatfy.com/documentation#evidence) In addition to storing the evidence identifier provided by the European Commission, Vatfy provides the part of "the IP address location of the customer’s device". For your second piece of matching location data, your payment processor should, in most cases, be able to provide you either a "Location of the customer’s bank" or the "Country which issued the credit card". Or you can provide "The billing address of the customer" yourself. The execution time in the JSON response corresponds to the time it took to validate a VAT ID with the European Commission, store the results in the database and provide a JSON response. Or for calculations or VAT rates fetching it basically tells you the time everything needed to run and return a result. The time it took to send your data to Vatfy or the time it takes it for you to receive the result are not reflected in that timing. TTFB of 500ms seems long to be honest. May you share me your current location and if you ran your validation via API or through the dashboard? I would like to take a look and see if there is anything I can do to speed up the server to serve a faster TTFB.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]