161–170 of 235 posts
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How would I dontate? The site seems down atm.
It's very slow... The hackernews effect, I'm afraid. Internationally, paypal is easiest: just use foundation@krita.org. Otherwise, for people in the EU, our bank account is ING, BIC: INGBNL2A, IBAN: NL72INGB0007216397 .
Btw, a business model: let artists pay to enter their names in a directory of artists for hire. They can charge clients extra (eg fee) to pay for these ads. True, it would be ideal to include reviews etc but links to their portfolio are often good enough, and it further highlights the power of krita... If interested, contact me via my HN profile - I've done this before successfully, both for startups and at scale, and I don't need your money. :-)
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I'd love to find out how much is raised via HN :) I donated a few euros as well.
That's a bit hard to figure out, since paypal doesn't track that. The total donated since the story came out is 3159.95 euros.
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I think you can also be charged if a currency conversion is involved (both directly and indirectly through poor exchange rates).
Euro denominated transactions within the SEPA zone (more than just the EU!) cannot be more expensive than domestic euro transactions. See https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area .
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Yes. This is what people don't understand. I call it "gratitude-ware". You give me an invoice, and I will pay you 500$ for a pixel on a page.
That's all you need? An invoice? I don't need to form a company or send you tax forms? I can make an invoice rather easily in LaTeX. So, can I do that? Add a note under the donation page that says, "if you need an invoice for your donation, email us here"?
From your point of view, you have sent and invoice and received funds. You need to pay taxes on those funds. How you do that depends a lot on your tax laws. Where I am (Japan), you can be self employed, in which case it is treated just like extra income (Japan doesn't have multiple categories of income, which is super awesome for getting rid of tax evasion). You can also set up various kinds of companies. These companies can shield you from certain kinds of taxes, but accounting becomes much more difficult. Usually it does not pay to set up a company in order to receive $500.
Depending on where you live, you might also be liable for VAT (or the equivalent). Exported goods are usually exempt, but exported services often aren't! Be careful! The reason for this is that value added taxes are usually only taxed once. So if you have a physical good that you are exporting, you have already paid the VAT on the things that made that physical good. Since a service is not made up of physical things, then you are liable for tax on the whole thing.
As is relevant to the original article, where you pay the tax is dependent upon where the company is base, or where the work is done. It gets really complicated from there, but basically if you are providing a service remotely (and not needing a work visa to provide the service), then you are performing the work in your country (even if you are working over the internet) -- or at least that's what my accountant has decided.
TL;DR: giving him an invoice (especially for a service) will make it easy for him to pay you, but will make things complicated for your taxes. It only makes sense if you think you will make a lot of money.
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No, they can be slippery as all hell. Ask a question by e-mail, expect a definitive yes/no answer, instead receive a phone call that's instantly claimed to be "off the record", and receive a parable about a nameless other customer who had this one situation this one time. Chances are the accountancy firm had never set up a charity before and has misunderstood the constraints, and chances are also high that they won't…
True, but it is worse than that. If you call the tax office and ask them direct questions about doing business abroad then even they still give you an answer with a disclaimer that it might not be correct.
Like other domains of law it's not always clear cut, it wasn't like, yeah Alice Inc. owes exactly X% taxes because of law A, it was like, we can argue that Alice Inc. owes X% based on laws A and B, C, but the tax authority could argue they owe Y% based on an argument that actually, laws B, D, and E apply to their case, which we would counter-argue with, etc., etc., etc.
So I'm not surprised the tax office wouldn't give straight answers; even they may not know how a court would rule depending on the specifics of the case.
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The EU VAT system was overhauled very recently (VAT rate of buyer, not seller) exactly because many businesses were "moving" to low VAT countries like Luxembourg.
So dumb.
It makes a lot of sense, unfortunately it's more of a hassle which hurts small businesses relatively more.
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Really? I always need to charge/pay VAT on services. The only exception is if both are VAT-registered businesses in the EU (but in different member states), in which case you can charge 0% VAT.
We're talking about things imported to the EU from outside the EU. Do you really pay VAT in europe on services you buy in the US? Or in Asia?
The problem for the Krita foundation was that their employee (who was outside of the EU) was doing consulting work through Krita. It didn't matter that he resided outside of the EU, because he was working as an employee. I presume if he were an arms-length contractor, he could have invoiced the work personally (and that's how they really should have set it up -- I assume he was trying to avoid Russian tax by invoicing through Krita, but I'm speculating).
So it was an EU service done in the EU (even though the employee was physically outside of the EU). VAT has to be paid for that. What I don't quite understand (and what seems to also mystify the Krita people) is why they have to also pay VAT on their donations. That's a pretty crazy law.
Just a quick reminder, if everyone here donates just 3-5$, the expenses will be paid in no time :) Krita is a great software, and even though I'm not an artist it's worth supporting.