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Just tried putting a UK customer’s business address in with (valid) VAT number. Doesn't allow me to save their address as it says it is an invalid VAT number.

Maybe the system only works for EU VAT customers?

But then how can I then sell to UK VAT registered businesses with VAT only being removed if they have a valid VAT number? Is the answer really that I need to save them as a consumer in the system and then a manual check and a separate tax setting, applying this manually each time?

Please can you add support to check UK VAT, as I which for UK VAT registered businesses to be able to buy memberships themselves with the VAT removed automatically if they are VAT registered :)

It seems like Invision isn't actually set up for successful businesses to sell subscriptions on? I pay several thousand dollars to invision each year, and would like the native ability to be able to sell to UK Vat registered businesses, you do have this support for EU. Please can you add for the UK?

You may be jumping the gun a little on the "invision isnt set up for x" here. It may well simply be that there is a bug somewhere. Do you have a VAT number for me to take a look at?

I've just logged this as a bug. It looks like the check service used no longer checks UK numbers

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30 minutes ago, Marc said:

You may be jumping the gun a little on the "invision isnt set up for x" here. It may well simply be that there is a bug somewhere. Do you have a VAT number for me to take a look at?

Hopefully that is just the case :)

I can send you one via private message if needed, please just let me know.

4 minutes ago, ekforum said:

I can send you one via private message if needed, please just let me know.

No need. It seems the API we use, simply stopped accepting them

This system was always meant for taxation among EU business AND across EU borders. It was never meant for non-EU countries (like the UK is now) and not for checks WITHIN one country. Those special taxation laws don’t apply to sales within a country, and therefore there is no need to check the VAT ID.

The settings also make it clear that this is EU only. The other option would be to separate B2B and B2C, but without any checks.

Bildschirmfoto 2025-01-28 um 17.59.47.png

  • Author
3 minutes ago, opentype said:

and therefore there is no need to check the VAT ID.

Trolling me as usual.

I do not even understand how this guy can be a Provider partner of invision with such closed mindset and such unhelpful replies. He even previously stated he put me on his ignore list, so why is he replying to my post? He is just an online bully tbh.

You may not sell to UK Vat registered customers, but there may be businesses on invision that do, not just me but other customers. Please think about other people and not just your own use case.

VAT and Sales Tax work differently. UK VAT in terms of deducing for VAT registered business and them accounting for it under the reverse charge works the same was for EU as UK.

I am grateful if invasion decide to add this for UK Vat registers businesses 🙏

Edited by ekforum

And you are misrepresenting what I am saying as usual and instantly going into personal attacks in a topic about taxations.

And as usual: all I am pointing out are FACTS, like the fact that the settings LITERALLY explain that the VAT check in Invision community is an EU-only system. I even posted the screenshot to prove what I say is true. Everyone reading this topic, can confirm it for themselves, seeing that I am right about this and you attack me once again for no reason.

For some reason, you only accept answers you want to hear, even if you are wrong and you could STOP being wrong by only considering what was said. Yet, you never do.

17 minutes ago, ekforum said:

You may not sell to UK Vat registered customers, but there may be businesses on invision that do, not just me but other customers. Please think about other people and not just your own use case.

Again, a blatant misrepresentation. Nothing I said had ANYTHING to with speaking “from my own case“. You are again being dishonest, inventing a reason to discredit what I said out of thin air. And everyone can see it. I don’t understand why you keep going down this route, as if you would somehow “win“ discussions about tax functions by attacking someone’s character 10 times in a row.

To be clear: You literally asked “Maybe the system only works for EU VAT customers?“ and I took the time to confirm exactly that with evidence. You could have just said “thanks for taking the time to confirm it. Maybe it can be extended further then?“ and we could have discussed that calmly, but your first sentence is once again a personal attack accusing me of trolling for daring to answer your own question.
Trolling is posting to deliberately provoke. Making a statement about taxation (me) cannot be trolling. Doesn’t even matter if the specific statement is right, wrong, or a matter of opinion. Constantly attacking, questioning and degrading someone’s character (you) falls exactly under trolling.

Edited by opentype

  • Author
15 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

I had a look for the UK API that would need to be used and wow. You need to register with HMRC, create a test application and then apply for approval to make it live. On top of that, the initial registration can take 2+ weeks. Talk about jumping through hoops when the EU service requires no registration or approval.

https://developer.service.hmrc.gov.uk/api-documentation/docs/api/service/vat-registered-companies-api/2.0

Thanks Stuart, do you think this is feasible for you to add this functionality? 🙏

15 hours ago, ekforum said:

Thanks Stuart, do you think this is feasible for you to add this functionality? 🙏

Its in our bug reports, however as mentioned, technically it isnt actually a bug, since its an EU check service and the UK is not an EU member state.

15 hours ago, ekforum said:

I do not even understand how this guy can be a Provider partner of invision with such closed mindset and such unhelpful replies. He even previously stated he put me on his ignore list, so why is he replying to my post? He is just an online bully tbh.

"Providers" are independant people or organisations, who develop products or provide services that work with our product. There is no association with invision. He is well within his right to ignore, or not ignore things on the site, and indeed tried to answer your question. What you quoted, technically was actually correct. While its been added as a bug, its technically not a bug.

  • Author
33 minutes ago, Marc said:

Its in our bug reports, however as mentioned, technically it isnt actually a bug, since its an EU check service and the UK is not an EU member state.

Thank you for your reply.

Do you think this is feasible for Invision to add this functionality? 🙏

Otherwise all businesses around the world which are required to register for UK VAT from £0 worth of sales are unable to automatically validate UK VAT registered businesses and sell to UK VAT registered businesses removing the VAT automatically from the invoice.

There is a work around, to manually process a payment after manually checking. The UK is a very large market for many to sell to and would be great if the functionality was added as it doesn’t just affect UK VAT registered businesses it affects all forign companies selling to the UK market if VAT is applicable.

Edited by ekforum

1 hour ago, ekforum said:

Do you think this is feasible for Invision to add this functionality? 🙏

See Stuarts message above on this. It's 'possible' to do so. They just don't make it easy to do so

It's something we're going to have to discuss internally, according to VIES (The EU service) UK VAT numbers haven't been checkable via their service for 4 years and no one has noticed. That does give some indication of the demand for this. It may just not make sense to work on something that's going to likely take a month or more to implement.

We could bypass validation for VAT numbers for UK addresses, would that solve your problem?

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25 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

It's something we're going to have to discuss internally, according to VIES (The EU service) UK VAT numbers haven't been checkable via their service for 4 years and no one has noticed. That does give some indication of the demand for this. It may just not make sense to work on something that's going to likely take a month or more to implement.

We could bypass validation for VAT numbers for UK addresses, would that solve your problem?

Yes, unsure why no demand. Anyone outside of the UK selling Memberships to customers within the UK must charge VAT and remit to the UK as there is a £0 threshold so must immediately register. Same with the EU, any company outside of the EU selling to the EU must immediately collect EU VAT. Local companies selling just to the local market do have some thresholds before they must register for VAT.

The issue with the suggested workaround above, is that it would potentially allow non UK VAT registered entities to put a random number in and then deduct the VAT?

I am unsure exactly how Invision interacts with Stripe, and at what point the VAT is removed, as we have only recently registered for VAT and Stripe needs the VAT number (of ours) before can enable tax collection. So currently any VAT registered businesses we have produced an invoice for with a special VAT reverse charge setting within Stripe so it can be deducted, after having manually validated their VAT number. Payment has then been by bank transfer.

Or with invasion does the check purely happen at the Invision software level rather than letting Stripe handle anything?

For another project that I am using, we use an alternative community software and the checks happen with the Stripe level, but it is integrated closely into the system. Although they do not have an invoice system like Invision, which is good to have here :)

Open to workarounds and finding a solution that works for invision too, just would be nice for everything to talk together nicely.

Currently does invasion tell Stripe how much tax was added to the invision software issued invoice so that Stripe knows how much the tax calculation should be?

I think you find the majority of our customers use Commerce for B2C not B2B sales, which is probably why it hasn't been an issue.

VAT checking in Commerce will validate the VAT number is valid and then add the admin-defined VAT rate for that location. It also shows the VAT number on invoices. It doesn't do anything more, or pass the information over to the payment processor.

If we removed the UK VAT validation, You could set up a fraud rule to hold any payments from UK locations, manually verify the VAT number and then approve or reject the order.

  • Author
Just now, Stuart Silvester said:

I think you find the majority of our customers use Commerce for B2C not B2B sales, which is probably why it hasn't been an issue.

Yes actually that is most probably true! And collecting VAT numbers is not applicable for consumers or non VAT registered entities, as they are treated like B2C.

4 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

VAT checking in Commerce will validate the VAT number is valid and then add the admin-defined VAT rate for that location. It also shows the VAT number on invoices. It doesn't do anything more, or pass the information over to the payment processor.

Do you know how Stripe would define if the customer is a business or a consumer for tax calculation purposes? Does it depend on if the Consumer or Business address in invasion is filled out, or is there is no way for stripe to calculate this and it assumes all customers have VAT within the price?

Stripe allows for multiple accounts, each with different tax settings, but the invasion integration just allows for one Stripe account key.

But Invision is telling some information to Stripe I would have thought? If for EU Vat registered businesses, it must do something? Or all it literally does it determine if the VAT should be added to the invsion invoice?

On the other software I'm using, which also just uses one account key, the VAT number is entered at checkout and removed at the Stripe level for the customer. So Stripe does understand which customers are business / consumers.

2 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

If we removed the UK VAT validation, You could set up a fraud rule to hold any payments from UK locations, manually verify the VAT number and then approve or reject the order.

Appreciate a possible suggest solution. Would that work around apply to just consumer addresses, or all? As holding for all customers with a UK address wouldn't be practical, ~95% of the customers are indeed consumers. Especially if it also counts for renewals.

I guess another work around, I could maybe set up a custom product for VAT registered businesses with a separate tax setting within invision, allowing payment only via Bank Transfer to skip the Stripe integration, which may not be that well integrated as may not be doing what I thought it was. But then it would be duplicating the packages in the store and making it more messy.



I appreciate your time answering this, and I understand that tax calculation is a difficult and complicate subject.

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My original assumption was that the VAT number was needed to be added within Invision, which is then passed onto Stripe to remove the VAT, and the Stripe tax calculation automatically took that into account. (Other software I am using for another project does tax the VAT number at the Stripe level and that is where it is removed)

But from the above it sounds like that it doesn't work like that.

However, it looks like Invision does provide Stripe with the product/subscription name (unsure on what other details it provides)

In which case if using Stripe for tax calculations, it may be better to have a separate product/subscription for VAT registered businesses anyway, as therefore (unable to test yet as awaiting VAT number to enable Stripe tax calculations) it may be possible to mark those products automatically as excluded from the tax calculations from within Stripe.

If the above is the case then automatically validating the VAT numbers may not actually much of an issue, and a manual check when setting up those products/subscriptions for Vat registered entities is fine.

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Although maybe would be useful if was a checker like in the EU, then allows for instant purchases from VAT business accounts from the forum store 🤔

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