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Stripe Tax

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Re: Stripe Tax

#111

Post by mytailorisrich »

yannoninator wrote: post #101
mytailorisrich wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Yes, that's exactly my point: At some point you are completely locked in with a single supplier that holds your entire income stream and perhaps even more than that.

Ideally (easier said that done, I know) you want to have at least 2 suppliers for any key piece of infrastructure as early as possible and to avoid letting a supplier 'expand' the number of tasks they do for you too much.

The latter seems to be Stripe's strategy: They start with payments then expand step by step in everything related et even in things like company incorporation.

Re: Stripe Tax

#112

Post by kmoriarty »

jitbit wrote: post #90

So. After 10 years in business and THOUSANDS of customer requests (I even made one myself, in-person when I met Patrick Colison at a conference) Stripe has introduced... a calculator. And you still have to do everything yourself - filing the papers and wiring money. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with my current payment provider that handles _everything_. I do admire Stripe and wish I could move some day :(

Thanks for the feedback. We’re working toward an end goal of making tax compliance as simple as clicking a button. In talking with users they called out three big pain points: knowing what the obligations are, knowing what rate/rules to apply and how to calculate tax (e.g. SaaS is taxable at 80% of the base rate of the price in Texas), and then how to file and remit the money once collected. Stripe Tax solves the first two out of the box today, and with TaxJar we’ll be able to bring filing and remittance as a native part of our offering.

Re: Stripe Tax

#113

Post by adamfeldman »

toast42 wrote: post #109
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

Stripe acquired TaxJar ~45 days ago – that's awesome

Re: Stripe Tax

#114

Post by kmoriarty »

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..

Good question! Today you would still need to register yourself, however we tried to make this as easy as possible in two ways:

1) We monitor your transaction and compare them to local thresholds so you know where/when you may need to register: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/set-up#monitoring-your-obligatio...

2) We provide documentation/links to the exact sites to register: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/registering#list-of-state-and-co...

In the future though we'd love to also offer registrations on your behalf, this is just the beginning!

Re: Stripe Tax

#115

Post by cashewchoo »

mchusma wrote: post #93
kmoriarty wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Completely understand your reaction to pricing. For a bit of context, we’ve spent the past year listening to users and trying to understand the best way to price. In finalizing our launch pricing, we made sure there are no fixed upfront costs or contracts, nor are there any per transaction fixed fees either. We tried to find a price point that ultimately was not prohibitive for small business…

My honest feedback on pricing was "expensive but we would only want to apply it on non-US users." Also, we wouldn't want to have to pay for invoicing, which is honestly much much worse of a value prop. For someone with a 20% margin business, the combination of these and payments products is about 4%, or 20% of all profit. While this is the first product since payments I have liked (so good work there) it would be nic…

It's worth noting that there's the interchange fees that come along with using a credit card in the US aren't just a pure profit rake for the credit card companies.

It obviously pays for computing resources and staffing and such, but beyond that it also, roughly, pays for all the fraud that happens with any credit card. In many cases, when someone does a fraud, it's someone "in the middle" (i.e. not the fraudster, the card holder, or the merchant) who ends up holding the bag.

It's also paying for some aggregate amount of credit risk that card users pose to their banks.

Credit card fees are high because fraud is such a colossal problem, and at various levels it's better for institutions to just eat costs (and thus slightly raise the minimum viable price they can charge for processing) than make it harder for people to buy things.

Re: Stripe Tax

#116

Post by cashewchoo »

manigandham wrote: post #94
kmoriarty wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Completely understand your reaction to pricing. For a bit of context, we’ve spent the past year listening to users and trying to understand the best way to price. In finalizing our launch pricing, we made sure there are no fixed upfront costs or contracts, nor are there any per transaction fixed fees either. We tried to find a price point that ultimately was not prohibitive for small business…

> " nor are there any per transaction fixed fees either " Why not? Wouldn't fixed fees be preferable to a relative basis for something like this?

It punishes smaller transactions unfairly, which doesn't make a lot of sense since the size of the dollar amount probably doesn't have anything to do with the incremental cost to stripe to compute the tax bill.

Re: Stripe Tax

#117

Post by bsears »

Co-founder of Billflow here.

We were lucky enough to be able to integrate the Stripe Tax beta with Billflow. In my opinion this is the coolest thing Stripe is launched (For SaaS) since they came out with subscriptions. It just works™.

Implementing Stripe Tax was dead-easy, to get it working we essentially just had to switch a boolean to true on our subscription creation code.

Also, the new functionality of the upcoming invoice API is something we've been wanting for a while - being able to estimate the first invoice for a subscription _without_ the customer existing beforehand makes life so much easier when checkout is concerned.

Huge props to the Stripe team, love this product!

Re: Stripe Tax

#118

Post by HatchedLake721 »

jitbit wrote: post #90

So. After 10 years in business and THOUSANDS of customer requests (I even made one myself, in-person when I met Patrick Colison at a conference) Stripe has introduced... a calculator. And you still have to do everything yourself - filing the papers and wiring money. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with my current payment provider that handles _everything_. I do admire Stripe and wish I could move some day :(

What's the other solution? Stripe to become merchant of record like Paddle.com?

Re: Stripe Tax

#119

Post by kmoriarty »

tjpnz wrote: post #54

Side question but what solutions exist for managing withholding? That presents a huge barrier to entry for certain business models, even more so when you have users living in multiple tax jurisdictions.

Hey! We haven't tackled tax withholding yet. That said, I'd love to learn more about your use case and requirements if you're up for it: kmoriarty@stripe.com

Re: Stripe Tax

#120

Post by staticassertion »

______- wrote: post #105
ttoinou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Gusto files your taxes for you.
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