Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stripe Tax

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 383 posts

Re: Stripe Tax

#101

Post by yannoninator »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #67
vvoyer wrote: post #5

I was lucky to be part of the beta for my SaaS ( https://turnshift.app ) and I must say this new feature simplifies things A LOT. Especially as a EU business owner, I previously had to sync every VAT tax rate possible, use a complex workflow to know if a customer needed to pay taxes or not, link tax rates to customers, and create taxes reports for my accountant. Stripe tax does all of that automatically, based on the…

The downside is of course that Stripe takes over more and more of your important infrastructure. A question should always be how to include several suppliers and/or how to change supplier in order not to put all in your eggs in a single basket.

The cost of letting Stripe do all the work than moving over to another provider is extremely costly and can damage sales.

Unless your provider really sucks, it's always important to evaluate carefully and ideally stick with them unless it is really that bad.

Re: Stripe Tax

#102

Post by dagw »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #55
dagw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe and Swish solve different problems. Swish is mobile phone based direct bank transfers, Stripe is credit/debit card transactions. The big problem with Swish is that it only works if you have a phone with a Swedish SIM card and a Swedish bank account in a supported bank (which admittedly is most of them). With Stripe you can take money from anyone with a Visa or Mastercard

> Stripe and Swish solve different problems. Swish is mobile phone based direct bank transfers, Stripe is credit/debit card transactions. At a higher level of abstraction, these are are the same problem -- conveniently and safely paying money to another entity (whether person or business). If we assume that normally someone has a phone at the same time they have their credit/debit card, then the how isn't really that…

So again, in a situation where it is very likely that you could use Swish with ~0 fees or Stripe, do people continue choosing Stripe?

Why not both? First of all, Swish is only free for transfers to or from private individuals. Companies pay a pr transaction fee. I don't know how the fees compare, but it is probably not a huge difference. If you're a company handling a huge number of transactions pr day I suspect you'll be able to negotiate a better deal with a card processing company.

Also there are still people inside Sweden who have credit/debit cards but not Swish, for example tourists, older people or people here on temporary work contracts.

Secondly there are reasons why people would want to use a credit card instead of having the money taken directly from their bank account. One such reason is if it's a company making the purchase it is much more convenient to use your company card. Another aspect is if you have more than one bank account (say your personal account and a joint account with your spouse) then you might have different cards tied to different accounts. You cannot do that with Swish.

Basically while there is some overlap between Swish and companies like Stripe, they aren't really drop in replacements for each other.

Edit: From a technical point of view there is probably nothing stopping Stripe from adding Swish as a payment option to their API if they wanted to have that as a feature for the Swedish market.

Re: Stripe Tax

#103

Post by rorykoehler »

kmoriarty wrote: post #92
Ndymium wrote: post #51

I have a nano sized business to cover some server costs in Finland. Here are the EU rules as I understand them: * Selling goods - If selling to private persons in European Union fiscal territory (EUFT), add 24% (Finnish VAT). - If selling to businesses in EUFT, no VAT. - If selling to anyone outside EUFT, no VAT, but you may be liable to collect and pay VAT to the customer's country's tax authorities. - Note that the…

I just wanted to mention, our invite-only starts today, but we're working on making Stripe Tax available to all very very soon! Either way, we will be reviewing and onboarding users as quickly as possible after you submit your interest!

How long is soon? I'm asking as I'm in the middle of building a saas. I might get to payments functionality in about 2-3 weeks if all goes well. Should I wait or register interest?

Re: Stripe Tax

#104

Post by LeonidasXIV »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #55
dagw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe and Swish solve different problems. Swish is mobile phone based direct bank transfers, Stripe is credit/debit card transactions. The big problem with Swish is that it only works if you have a phone with a Swedish SIM card and a Swedish bank account in a supported bank (which admittedly is most of them). With Stripe you can take money from anyone with a Visa or Mastercard

> Stripe and Swish solve different problems. Swish is mobile phone based direct bank transfers, Stripe is credit/debit card transactions. At a higher level of abstraction, these are are the same problem -- conveniently and safely paying money to another entity (whether person or business). If we assume that normally someone has a phone at the same time they have their credit/debit card, then the how isn't really that…

MobilePay in Denmark (which is about the same as Swish, with very similar constraints wrt to phone numbers and banks) seems to be trying to enter the online payments business. But it does require MobilePay which is ubiquitous in Denmark, but utterly useless outside of it. So the rollout to other markets is slow to non-existing (and given how Danish banks - which run MobilePay - seem not to be aware of the rest of the world), so if I were a merchant no way in hell I would chose to exclusively accept MobilePay online.

Re: Stripe Tax

#105

Post by ______- »

ttoinou wrote: post #23
vvoyer wrote: post #5

I was lucky to be part of the beta for my SaaS ( https://turnshift.app ) and I must say this new feature simplifies things A LOT. Especially as a EU business owner, I previously had to sync every VAT tax rate possible, use a complex workflow to know if a customer needed to pay taxes or not, link tax rates to customers, and create taxes reports for my accountant. Stripe tax does all of that automatically, based on the…

report taxes. Stripe tax does all of that It doesn't say they file the taxes for you. "Speed up filing and remittance with comprehensive reports" means they will help you with it, but not do it for you. Later on the website : "Stripe reports surface all the information you need for each filing location, so you can easily file and remit taxes on your own, with your accountant, or with a preferred partner. US filing pa…

> It doesn't say they file the taxes for you

Yay for automation, but is using third parties to file taxes not open to fraud and potential error (if you don't do it yourself?)

Re: Stripe Tax

#106

Post by wly_cdgr »

Naga wrote: post #56

That looks great, but that's a ridiculous pricing scheme. If you invoice $100k in a year, you're paying $4000 to Stripe to manage your sales tax. A lot of the issues with sales tax are not knowing your regulatory requirements and set up. I'd say that's probably worth $4k, but then going forward you still have to pay them that amount. I'd say it would be more worthwhile to pay an accountant to do that for you, and sav…

The replit guy needs to study your post so he can learn how to handle mistakes the right way

Re: Stripe Tax

#107

Post by kmoriarty »

rorykoehler wrote: post #103
kmoriarty wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to mention, our invite-only starts today, but we're working on making Stripe Tax available to all very very soon! Either way, we will be reviewing and onboarding users as quickly as possible after you submit your interest!

How long is soon? I'm asking as I'm in the middle of building a saas. I might get to payments functionality in about 2-3 weeks if all goes well. Should I wait or register interest?

Shoot me an email with your account ID and I'll make sure you're enabled by the weekend! kmoriarty@stripe.com

Re: Stripe Tax

#108

Post by kybernetikos »

xchaotic wrote: post #35

Ben Evans once described Stripe as tax on Internet SaaS. For a moment I’d thought it was Stripe admitting the same.

Credit card fees in general are like an extra tax. And credit card companies have so much power they have pushed the cost onto all transactions, even those that use cash (by forcing merchants to eat the cost difference, they push all prices with that merchant up).

Re: Stripe Tax

#109

Post by toast42 »

adamfeldman wrote: post #87

This looks great. Implementing Avalara for tax calculation was a large pain across multiple dimensions. Stripe Tax integrates with TaxJar for automatic US tax filing [1]. I wish TaxJar had clearer pricing [2], as 12 filings a year is tiny. [1]: https://www.taxjar.com/pricing/ [2]: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/reports

https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar

Re: Stripe Tax

#110

Post by dstick »

scubakid wrote: post #98
yannoninator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES, considering the only best competitor in this space Paddle takes 5%. Taxes is the reason why in the past most EU/UK businesses go to Paddle. Stripe's Tax feature now saves people who were considering Paddle a lot of time now.

With this new Stripe solution, do you still have to register for licenses to collect tax everywhere and remit the sales tax to various US states and foreign governments? Unless I misunderstand, that still sounds prohibitively onerous for anyone working as a solo dev or very small team..

Not sure how it works in the US but in the EU you don't have to register anything. Just keep tabs of what VAT you collected for what country, and then pay accordingly afterwards. No licenses needed.
Post reply on HN