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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

> Tax, and particularly VAT in the EU, is a real pain to deal with. Stripe does offer `tax_percent` to be added to invoices, but unfortunately this can only be added on top of the price. This means, that if I want to offer a flat price to all EU customers with VAT included, things get messy. Either I do my own tax thing separately (or via metadata), or I have to create a bunch of different subscription plans, each for every VAT rate in different EU countries...

Please don't do that if you do B2B because it means that people from different countries get different prices as business customers when they get VAT reimbursed. Also please provide reverse charge if possible.

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On the other hand, if you do B2C, it's just about the only way you can actually comply with all of the relevant EU tax and consumer protection rules. Mercifully, B2B is mostly spared that particular nightmare for now, though the reverse charge mechanism is not exactly fun to work with either.

It would certainly be helpful if Stripe made it easier to reconcile everything needed for those EU VAT returns. Some essential things like determining the exchange rate that was applied for a particular transaction if you work in multiple currencies remain quite awkward. The deposits from Stripe into merchant bank accounts also still don't seem to have any reference supplied so you can trace them back through the API to find the underlying charges, refunds, etc.

It is nice that they show the country of origin for the card now, though. At least that gives most merchants a fighting chance of keeping enough evidence of where every customer is based to satisfy the EU VAT rules.

> reverse charge mechanism is not exactly fun to work with either.

The reverse charge mechanism is great. The alternative system was to register for VAT in all 28 EU member states and file returns in each state. The reverse charge mechanism means if you are exporting services, you only have to deal with the your local tax authority. (Unless your customers are not VAT registered, then you have to make sure you stay under the threshold in each state.)

The reverse charge mechanism is great.

Well, it's better than the old alternative you mentioned, but that's a bit like saying the MOSS scheme is great because otherwise you'd have to register and file returns in every EU member state where you sold a single £5 knitting pattern PDF from your kitchen table business. Being better than a system so insanely disproportionate and over-complicated that small businesses would have no hope of complying isn't particularly impressive.

Yeah, it's abit insane. I spent a week or so implementing this for my saas not long ago.

Hopefully this will change in 2018 for companies making less than 100k EUR/month: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/digital-s...

Let's hope so, though I fear this will be a case of "too little, too late" for many small businesses. It's been more than two years now since the new system was introduced, and it seems many micro-businesses have already ceased trading as a result. Slightly larger businesses have probably either taken on significant extra compliance costs or ceased trading with customers elsewhere in the EU. All of that damage has already been done. :-(

We're B2C ...

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