Ask HN: What payment company do you use that automatically apply EU VAT rates?

14 points by cookiemonsta 10 years ago | 11 comments

In 2015, EU rules mean VAT rates for sales to EU customers (for automatic online payments) have to be based on where the customer is.

If I use stripe (which I do love, their API, their support etc), I'd have to manually set up VAT stuff.

Some companies automate this (which makes it so much easier), such as http://www.fastspring.com/vat Fast Spring.

What other companies do this? What company would you recommend?

(I am building a subscription based website, and I need support for affiliates (hopefully fully managed by the payment provider))

The main things I am looking for:

1) The EU VAT stuff is handled

2) They support subscriptions/rebilling.

3) They support affiliates (hopefully through their site, so I don't have to code much to work with it)

4) They have nice APIs. I'm coding this in PHP (with Laravel), so extra bonus if they have a php library.

skrish 10 years ago |

At https://chargebee.com we support EU VAT along with Invoicing & all the comprehensive credits related use cases that consumes time for finance folks.

We do have a neat API https://apidocs.chargebee.com/. And there is Laravel bundle being updated by one of our customer in Netherlands.

https://packagist.org/packages/tijmen-wierenga/laravel-charg...

We support affiliates tracking with refersion.com - supported via Chargebee hosted payment pages & API.

We also support several gateways including Stripe, Braintree etc., along with Invoice based payments that can be reconciled for bank transfers (ACH equivalent in Europe is expected to release in early Q3).

Do give the free trial a spin. And the product is free to get started upto first $50k usd invoicing (just like Braintree's Ignite program). I would love to hear your feedback. (krish at chargebee).

Disclosure: I am one of the cofounders.

qvikr 10 years ago | |

I was wondering why nobody had mentioned Chargebee here yet. If you're building a subscription business, I'd say this is the way to go. Unless you want to worry about managing recurring billings, maintaining legacy pricing tiers everytime you change your plans, one-off discounts, etc.

Just make sure you have a recurring billing system in place right from the start instead of hacking it on top of your gateway yourself. You should be able to focus on your product right now - not the billing, and the tech debt if you choose to move when the wheels are spinning is just not worth it.

[Source: Hacked a system in my last org and burnt fingers, before happily moving to Chargebee]

dorfuss 10 years ago |

I'm not sure what do you mean by "automatically". Of course different EU countries have different rates, but some countries also have internally many different rates, and that depends on what is your product or who is your client (e.g. business vs governmental organisation vs private school vs institute for blind people could all have different rates for the same product). There is also a difference between 0 rate and exempt.

VAT is generally a huge pain in the ass if you don't have flat rates. This leads to absurds like coffee with milk has a different rate than milk with coffee. There are court cases in which they rule what kind of construction of a book shelf gets which VAT rate.

And it gives multiple opportunities for all sorts of abuses, including my favourite one: you open two companies, you sell same products internally with different VAT rates (like coffee+milk example), and the difference becomes your un-taxed profit. Perfectly legal.

This is why you have the Big Four consulting companies (I worked for one).

Tl:dr When you grow bigger employ a couple of good accountants.

cookiemonsta 10 years ago |

I did find this, which might be useful for anyone who ends up Googling and finding this thread:

https://rachelandrew.github.io/eu-vat/third-parties.html

(although I don't know why the knitting links are listed)

Zelmor 10 years ago | |

Knitting and crocheting is a big thing, actually. Huge community, people selling done products as well as patterns for you to use. Both are calming hobbies and a nice break from programming, even for just 10 minutes at a workplace power-break or home.

ivoo 10 years ago |

Have a look at Quaderno.io (disclaimer - I work here). We integrate with Stripe and take care of 1, 2 and 4 https://quaderno.io/docs/api/

rsto 10 years ago | |

Your product really looks great but the fixed-rate subscription plan is an issue for me. Is there any chance you'll offer also a transaction-based price plan (like FastSpring)?

That would very much help to use your service from day 0 of the business, without paying three times as much as it costs to run it on a VPS :)

edit: typo

ivoo 10 years ago | | |

Thanks!

We don´t offer a transaction-based price plan, or expect to offer this in the future.

rsto 10 years ago | | |

Follow-up: octobat.com looks exactly like what I was looking for

MattBearman 10 years ago |

I use FastSpring for managing BugMuncher's subscription payments. It works really well, and it's great not having to worry about VAT.

Having said that, as revenue grows I'll be looking into just doing it manually with Stripe. Partly because FastSpring takes a much bigger cut than most other payment providers, but also because their payment pages are a bit shit.

vram22 10 years ago |

This is how Gumroad handles it :)

http://blog.gumroad.com/post/110080508463/vat