How many hackers here are EU-based? How do you handle invoicing (VAT etc)?
Hey hackers!
Quick survey here: I'm trying to find out what's the most common way in the community to handle the mess that is VAT calculations across Europe.
How do you guys do it? Do you use any third party service (e.g. Quaderno, Taxamo..) or have rolled up your own?
Cheers!
At EmailOctopus we have built an in-house solution. Looked at Chargebee, Quaderno and others but just built it in-house on top of Stripe. Stripe has inbuilt functionality for taxes, so we just needed to build the front end to show an additional modal if the user was in the EU.
The VAT number validation and rates we just use an API for, there's a few out there to do that such as: https://euvat.ga/
Thanks Thomas, super helpful! Can I ask what was the reason that pushed you to write your own, instead of using a third party? Was it cost, complexity of integration..?
The thought of an ongoing cost of $100 a month for the lifetime of business, when we weren't making much money in the first place pushed us to write our own.
My simple answer would be Zoho Books/ Invoice. They have specific editions for UK / Europe hopefully to manage all your Taxes and Invoices. If you have any queries, lets discuss.
I had looked into those, but do they support automated invoicing? Was thinking more of a SaaS product with subscriptions
They do. Check out recurring invoice and Zoho subscription that has all customization and tight integration with books and invoice. They too have workflow automation.
Taxamo does. And leapin.eu too I believe.