Creating a VAT invoice for EU customers in stripe
Hi,
We use stripe as our payment gateway and have customers spread out across the world. For larger payments we do send out a custom invoice, but for monthly subscriptions, we have automated the payments in stripe.
Any idea how to integrate VAT for EU customers. We are based in Canada.
Trending on Indie Hackers
Gumroad and Paddle both act as your merchant of record, and in exchange for slightly higher fees, collect and remit Sales Tax & VAT on your behalf.
We typically split our billing across Stripe (default) and then Stripe Billing for Vat exempt EU customers, and then refer those to Gumroad when they need to remit VAT on their invoice & get it refunded (since we're a non-EU company).
How do you segregate that information? At what point do you know that these will be VAT exempt and they need to be routed to Gumroad. Is this all manual or using API's?
At our volume, manual works. I'm sure it could be automated with APIs once the product matured.
Yes, I think we will need to detect on sign up where the user is coming from and accordingly send them different payment gateway.
Hi @AggarwalBhavya,
are you looking for something like this? https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/sending
You can set the tax rate in the api call.
More info: https://medium.com/slight-pause/how-to-setup-saas-subscriptions-correctly-to-charge-vat-in-europe-d75d857b5d01
One way to calculate the VAT rate yourself would be: vatapi.com
Thank you for sharing that post and API.
How is paddle working out for you? It seems like so much work to move to another payment solution- we are well integrated with stripe. But, the manual calculation seems to be quite a lot of work.
Hey, I am not using Paddle. The Medium article was not written by me, it's just an article I've previously used as a reference. You are right the manual calculation does seem like some work.
Oh I see. I thought you laid out your plan. What did you end up using?
My employer went for subscriptions with PayPal and generating invoices ourselves, even though it would have been much easier to use an existing service to handle that.