
Ask HN: How do startups in Europe generally deal with the VAT requirements? - vazamb
Hey everyone,<p>I am in the process of turning a side project into something more serious. Being based in Germany means my company will be subject to the quite insane European VAT regulations. How do you deal with this in a SaaS business? Especially at the beginning.
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egraether
We just launched our website including an online store for selling software
licenses. We are based in Austria. Our product is Coati, a source explorer for
C/C++: [https://www.coati.io/](https://www.coati.io/)

After speaking to tax accountants and the finance office we decided to go for
a reseller. The reseller does the invoicing for you. You just need to do the
bookkeeping of the money you get from the reseller. We are using FastSpring.
They do monthly subscriptions as well.

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johneth
There are a few Facebook groups about it (search 'EU VAT Action Group' and
'Digital VAT 2015'). They're mostly microbusinesses that are UK based (so that
may colour the comments you see). There's an astounding amount of ignorance
and conflicting information amongst both business owners and tax authorities
in many countries about exactly what this VAT for digital products thing is. I
myself am in your position of needing to figure out the VAT situation very
soon, so I hope you find some useful information and ideas.

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BjoernKW
Ask a tax counsellor who knows about online business (there are shockingly
many who today still have no idea about it).

That said there is no straightforward, easy way to deal with this. The whole
process is an insane mess. You can do everything correctly and still have
problems with your local tax authorities afterwards (partly because they don't
really know how to deal with these regulations themselves).

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flashm
In what way?

You deal with them by using the tax rules that are set out, and buy getting an
accountant to make sure you are adhering to them.

Any issues that arise about revenue if you have to start charging vat are due
to your pricing, not the Vat rules.

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threesixandnine
It's obvious you have no idea. It's not about pricing. It's about that you
have to registered as some sort of VAT ordinary or not-ordinary business. Hard
to translate into English.

If you do business within EU with other countries you have to register for VAT
and charge it. Then you have to get customer info and charge what his country
charges....it's a mess.

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flashm
I know what you're talking about, I'm Vat registered and do business across
the EU.

You're correct though, I misunderstood your question, it seems you're not even
at that stage yet. You should really talk to an accountant, not HN. They will
tell you exactly what you need to be doing.

Doing Vattable business with other EU countries is a pain. You will need
whether each customer is vat registered in their particular country and either
charge Vat or not based upon that.

Are you doing business to business sales, or business to customer?

