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Ask HN: How do you handle VAT / Sales Tax accounting as B2C SaaS?

97 points throw_1VJ51pMb | 1 comments | 08 Mar 25 08:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Hey! I run a B2C SaaS and I use Stripe for all of my sales (subscriptions).

I am looking to learn how others handle their VAT / Sales Tax filing.

I know that the standard answer would be to use Paddle / LemonSqueezy / Polar.sh, but I already have a lot of subscribers on Stripe which makes quick migration non-trivial.

I am especially looking for some reliable accounting companies / accountants that can register and file Sales Tax across US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc. (It does not have to be a global solution).

It's my understanding that solutions like Stripe Tax, Alavara, Quaderno, etc. only help collect the necessary data (which I consider the easier part, at least for digital goods), but do not handle the registration & filing (though I've learned that Quaderno will support filing Sales Tax in the US on your behalf soon).

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Some jurisdictions are relatively easy to handle (for example, one can handle whole EU by uploading a simple CSV [1] once a quarter and the CSV is easy to generate from Stripe's records).

But unfortunately there are tons of others that are much more complicated and scattered -- for example, due to the economic nexus laws in the US, I now have to file Sales Tax in each individual state where I am over the threshold (and many states have thresholds in low hundreds of transactions, so it's not hard to reach).

[1]: https://www.elster.de/bportal/helpGlobal?themaGlobal=osseust_import

[2]: If you do not feel comfortable commenting here, you can also reach out at z2qmk@pekoi.com (temporary email)

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matthewtse ◴[12 Mar 25 02:24 UTC] No.43339334[source]▶
I recently acquired a SaaS that does business with people in the EU (we bill with stripe), so I decided to continue paying VAT. I do it all by a combination of code, scripts, and by-hand.

We have custom code that determines the VAT rate to charge, and also looks up a customer's VAT number to see if they qualify for VAT exclusion. At the end of each quarter I have a script that calculates the amount of VAT to be paid to each country in the EU, then visit the Ireland VAT OSS site, input the values for each country manually (they don't allow CSV!!!!), then send them a wire using wise.com.

The current scheme is an evolution of what the former founders did. It was a nightmare to get things onto good footing after the acquisition. But once I did it for the first time, the subsequent times are pretty straightforward, and I probably won't touch it again for a long while.

I could probably move towards stripe tax, or paddle/lemonsqueezy, but the migration would be a nightmare. And it's not a good business decision to do a lot of work including risky migrations to move onto a new provider that will charge a larger percentage as a service fee, just to better handle taxes, which I've now largely figured out.

The one advantage to doing all this, is that I actually understand this stuff pretty well now, rather than it being a black box where I just pay a company a lot of money so I don't have to think about it. Open question on if that's actually worth my time. It seems like it is for now.

One opinion I'll offer, is that all these foreign tax agencies are far less organized than you might think. You could probably get away by not paying VAT, for far longer/more revenue than you'd think, and if you do want to be a proper foreign business and pay, there's basically zero verification on if you're paying the right amount, so just try your best??

Feel free to ask me for any advice around VAT/etc. matthew@improvmx.com

replies(1): >>43339501 #
notpushkin ◴[12 Mar 25 02:54 UTC] No.43339501[source]▶
ImprovMX – now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while!

Could I ask you why Ireland specifically?

replies(2): >>43346362 #>>43350038 #
1. matthewtse ◴[13 Mar 25 03:07 UTC] No.43350038[source]▶
A few blogs mentioned that as an external US entity, you probably want to do VAT with Ireland (basically you deal only with Ireland for paying VAT, and what you pay gets forwarded through the system to all the other EU countries).

The reasons they cited were that it's in English, they have among the shortest initial application times (a few weeks vs. a few months for others), and that they're generally the most business friendly (which you can guess given how they attracted all the US tech companies as as tax haven).

In practice I've found this to be the case. I've had a few email chains with the Ireland tax authority, and they were responsive within a few days. And I got things done. Though I was surprised to find that the "best" EU tax authority was still worse than the IRS.

Things I was surprised by: 1) It takes an extremely long and complicated application form (and several weeks) to get an EU VAT number to pay VAT taxes. By comparison the IRS lets you get an EIN instantly, and you only need to fill out a few fields 2) Setting up a login to the Ireland Tax system is the worst thing in the world. I expected a simple username/password type system. Instead: you apply, then you have to remember a code, they don't give you any confirmation email, then 3 weeks later they send you an email giving you another code, and you have to hold onto that code, because you need to wait 72 hours for the database to update, before you can enter that code to create a certificate (but you don't know to use the first code or the second code), and you then need to save that certificate to your local machine, and re-upload it whenever you want to login. It's actually even worse than I describe, but I honestly cannot even remember all the steps 3) When filling in how much VAT you owe each country, you need to fill out every country and every amount manually, no way to upload a CSV or anything

If this is how bad Ireland is, I imagine other EU countries are even worse.