🚀 Launching VatZen to help businesses sell in EU

Hello hackers! 👋

I’d like to announce VatZen’s public launch and would love to share with you a bit more information about the product and tell you why we created it.

Let me introduce you to one interesting legislation. Since January 1st, 2015, EU laws require all companies to charge VAT on private customers irrespective of where your business is located, inside or outside the EU. And companies have to charge proper rates based on the customer’s location. Sounds complicated, huh?

At one point, while working on a SaaS product which targeted the EU market, we understood that we need to comply with the regulation I mentioned above. So, we started building VAT rules ourselves, collecting proper rates from EU commission DB.

It was working more-or-less fine, before we started working with businesses and realized that we should avoid charging VAT-registered business, and we have to verify VAT numbers as well as store the evidence of the verification for later potential audit.

Here was the moment we understood that we need to separate this logic into a separate product. This is how VatZen’s was born.

Our goal was to create as simple product as possible, which would allow anyone to sell online products in a compliant way while keeping the costs of the service low.

Currently VatZen’s contains the following services:

• EU Vat Rates. This service allows you to fetch proper VAT rates for every customer. It allows you to geolocate the customer and the retrieve proper rate easily.
• VAT Number Validations. As you shouldn’t charge VAT from a registered business, this is the service that provides you the ability to verify VAT numbers and store the verification evidence for audit purposes.
• VAT Prices Generation. This is a practical combination of services above. VatZen will automatically compute price for you.

And we’re also looking to launch the following services in the upcoming future:

• Stripe & BrainTree OneClick. So all the data will be collected automatically from your payment providers and prepared for reporting.
• VAT Invoices Generator. To generate proper invoices along with our pricing service.
• Reporting Helper. We want to help you easily report VAT via VAT-Moss scheme.

Feel free to check this out at https://vatzen.com!

Please let us know your thoughts on the service! Are we missing any feature you’d need for your startup?