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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Just keep in mind that most countries have specific legal requirements around invoices. Stuff like VAT numbers etc

Needing an EU VAT number for customers in other EU countries made me find a customer outside the EU. That is in spite of me not qualifying for VAT (self-employed with income below the threshold).

I think this bureaucracy discourages a lot of people from even starting a business.

I don't know where you are from and if the process is very different there but from the places I have experience with I would describe the process as, trivial.

Romania apparently. My country (Germany) isn't known for its easy to navigate bureaucracy but even here getting an EU VAT ID was trivial. Certainly easier than most of the other parts involved in starting a (legal) business. I think it was literally one of the documents they gave me to sign when I registered my company.

EDIT: I looked it up. It's literally just something you get to check off on the tax registration form for the company. Alternatively there's an online form (imagine that!) for existing companies. Impressively, there's no fax machine involved at any point.

>Impressively, there's no fax machine involved at any point.

Well, now that's a fa(u)x pas(s).

That's a good point. I definitely want to support different formats will probably need to support a --format and --template flag as well.

This is great stuff! To use this in Canada, we have a few extra requirements as well. Firstly, we have to separate our tax onto two lines, one for Federal tax (called GST) and one for Provincial tax (has a different name in each province) and we are also legally required to include our Federal and Provincial tax registration numbers on the same line as the amount of tax being charged.

Even trickier is that some line items could also be tax-exempt.

A config option such as the following would help for that:

  --tax 0.05 "GST" --label="GST #12345679"     \
  --tax 0.09975 "QST" --label="QST #55592929"

And to handle items that are tax exempt, an item can have the:

  --item ... --tax_exempt (or --tax_exempt="GST" in case it's only exempt from one of the sales taxes)

There's more to Canada tax rules than this, and they vary (like every country?). Some provinces have no provincial sales tax (one tax line), some provinces have Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) which aggregates GST and PST (one tax line). There's also no (federal) requirement to include your business number on the same line as the taxes.. it does need to be on the invoice if >$30 though.

Tax exemption at a federal or provincial level is then at the line-item level, not the invoice level (although perhaps invoice level is enough, for example agricultural products & prescription drugs shouldn't be taxed).

You may be required to charge the buyer's tax rate (rather than your operating tax rate).

And finally some goods/services have extra taxes (hospitality tax, for example).

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/busines... https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/busines...

running a company in the US makes you understand why companies tends to be successful there.

you can basically scribble an invoice on a napkin and it's gonna be ok, it's just so practical.

in other countries dealing with all the invoicing crap will burn you money and time while in the US you are already doing business, the upkeep is terrible.

Do you have data on businesses being more successful in the US than the rest of the world?

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