What are your experiences with Quickbooks, Xero, Quaderno for SaaS VAT collection?
Things are getting a bit more serious with my bootstrapped SaaS and I'm prepping for proper tax filing. My initial customers are from the US, South Africa, Czech Republic: all over the place. I'm looking for a tight integration for invoicing, VAT calculation and tax reporting. I collect payments via Stripe. Would love to hear experiences from SaaS founders on what worked for them. I'm EU based (Germany/Netherlands).
Hey,
I'm on the same situation, I'm building a SaaS, based in France. I'm experimenting with https://www.octobat.com/
They work with Stripe, they provide a checkout.js form like Stripe.
The difference is that it will look at the customer location based on its IP adress, and show a VAT number field if the customer is based in Europe. Then it will calculate VAT, generate the invoice etc.
So I can't personnaly recommend this service since I'm just starting, but I got good recommendations, it's cheap (31€ / months) and there is a good documentation :)
Is Stripe just your payment processor, or is it both your payment processor and billing solution?
It's payment, billing, subscriptions, invoicing etc. I have nothing but Stripe now.
Following you here, never invested enough time to find a proper solution.
My situation was a bit different (Canadian, so GST/PST instead of VAT).
Product.
I had developed the full Canadian taxes logic inside my app. So based on my company address and the customer address, I would add invoice items to my stripe invoice to charge the taxes. As we have two taxes in Canada, I could not use the tax field from Stripe :|
Canadian logic is contrary to EU one. Taxes are applied where the service is consumed, so if someone from Ontario uses my product, I have to charge Ontario's taxes.
I believe (and may be wrong) that in the EU you have to charge the taxes where the service is provided. So say you are in France and you have a client from Germany, you have to charge the France VAT.
Accounting.
I was using a custom Excel sheet for my accounting. I would export my bank transactions that would be converted into double entry accounting by a macro.
I would then export my client and transaction list from Stripe and do the same.
Down the line, I spent a lot of time managing this. This is something I want to do better in the future.
I don't think there is much valuable information in this reply, just wanted to share my experience and follow the thread ;-)
Thanks
Hey Dominic,
the VAT situation is the same in the EU. VAT is charged in the country of consumption. So Germany company with a Dutch client needs to charge Dutch VAT. This is a nightmare of course, so the EU came up with VATMOSS. A system where you pay once for all EU countries.
My search is for a services that takes care of this such as Quaderno. However, VAT is just one part of the accounting puzzle and I'm trying to avoid the custom excel sheet and monthly Stripe exports you mentioned.
We just use Fastspring. They collect VAT for us and file this with the tax authorites. Much simpler, and they also handle Australian GST, Canadian tax, ... . Paddle is similar.
What's the pricing like for Fastspring? Can't find it on their site which I find very strange for a payment based product. Paddle is really expensive. 5% fee.
Got this as top result from Google search snippet: "FastSpring Pricing. FastSpring has three subscription options but their actual pricing is not published on their website. According to third party sites, FastSpring charges 8.9% per transaction with a minimum order fee of $0.75 or 5.9% with additional $0.95 per transaction."
That's insane if it's true. 8.9% is really high.
Fastspring and Paddle handle the VAT submission. So to compare to Stripe, you'd need to add accounting costs and tax filing cost to the Stripe percentage. With Stripe you incur the VAT filing and documentation liabilities.
Well, in the real world I already have an accountant for all the other stuff, like filing local taxes, making yearly statements etc. Not sure if I'm completely not getting the astonishing markup Paddle and Fastspring are adding.
For my business, thanks to Fastspring, I don't need an accountant. So this really depends on you situation.