How do you handle sales tax/VAT compliance with stripe?
I've been thinking about switching my payment provider to Stripe but unfortunately it looks like they don't handle much tax related stuff.
As a solo founder it's nightmare selling internationally, programming all the different tax amounts, and sending them to the relevant authorities across the world.
So how do you guys handle this?
The best I found is Paddle.com which essentially acts like the App store and handles everything for you.
Stripe does have plugins like TaxJar but they only calculate the tax, not manage the full flow (submit it to relevant authorities etc).
I'm surprised there isn't more info regarding this out there for IHers using Stripe.
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Hey there! I'm Kelly, a Product Manager at Stripe, working on building features and tools to help businesses better manage global tax compliance. You're right that we don't have too much to help with that today (outside of setting the rules/rates yourself), but I'd be happy to show you what we are working on and see if it might help solve some of your woes. Feel free to shoot me an email - [email protected]
Hi Kelly! Wow thanks for reaching out, would love to learn more. Will shoot you an email.
I started building my own solution because I thought Quaderno was too expensive. Over time I had to add more and more special cases to the code to handle various requirements for accounting and also requirements on what invoice must include etc. Things like MOSS, different payment methods, various other variants of VAT like Australian/Indian, different VAT per region of certain countries, many different thresholds where the rules change. Completely different rules for B2B and B2C etc. It's not impossible by any means but going this route takes A LOT of time.
I have never used Paddle myself but if I started over today I would very likely give it a try.
Oh wow yeah that sounds like never ending work. If you get far with it maybe make it into an indie project :) A cheaper and simple alternative to Quaderno would be cool!
Use Paddle.