A lot of e-merchants I order at (even professionally) require immediate payment during checkout, and send the invoice only after the order is shipped.
Back on topic: I rather like these "simple" solutions, but the pricing seems to high for my taste, if you think of it: they are just generating and mailing PDF's. Also, invoices usually have requirements that are different per country, so I doubt their solution is universal enough.
Tax invoices are still invoices: issued before payment.
Currently, implementing VAT on Stripe (like Recurly does [1]) is a major pain, and I know of several companies which turned to other subscription systems just because of this.
Recurly is a pain in the ass as it forces you to charge VAT on all EU customers when under UK law we do not need to.
RARGH!
- determine automatically if VAT is applicable based on buyer and seller countries, and show the appropriate price on checkout
- support VAT bypassing when a valid VAT id is entered (if valid + buyer in EU but not in seller country, then the VAT must be removed)
- if US buyer pricing is 100, in my case for a french buyer the pricing will be 100 + 20 of VAT, so the total is increased
- handle invoicing
Does Quaderno handles this? I was under the impression that not, but could be mistaken!
VAT is complicated! Varies a lot depending on the goods you are selling as well.
Do you think it's best for YOU to send the email directly to my customer, or really shouldn't it come from me? What about the confidentiality of my customer records. You mention 3GB of storage, are you keeping these invoices around on your server?
The Stripe API is powerful, but you definitely open up your data to 3rd parties when you leverage it like this.
Could you bundle a 'self-hosted' version which could be run internally?
And that's why we love HN. I suspect they are working on it right now:-)
I would be concerned about the customer record confidentiality issue. Here in Europe we could only consider working with you if you were signed up to the EU Safe Harbor Act. Its pretty minimal for you - and makes my life easier as I can actually not break UK law.
We send the invoices on your behalf. Your customers will see only you emails address, not ours.
As we're an European based company, we support the European Data Protection Directive. All your customer records are safe.
At this moment we don't have plan to develop a 'self-hosted' version. But we can considere it in the future.
Thanks for your feedback!! ;-)
If you're not doing this with my SMTP credentials those emails are going to go straight into most folks' spam folders, as I have properly set up SPF records.
I would literally have paid for three $24 subscriptions by now but sadly it failed to meet my expectations.
Some immediate problems:
1) I can't add the metadata it requires to my Stripe transactions without writing code which I will then have to maintain. I'm using WuFoo's Stripe integration to create the transactions.
2) I connected a Stripe account but I can't work out how to import existing transactions at all. (Maybe above issue is blocking this.)
3) Why is connecting Stripe the 5th step in setup when it's the core part of the value proposition and could be first?
4) I'm feeling annoyed and frustrated that time has been wasted building features I don't care about (Expenses, Estimates, Contacts and Delivery Notes) when it doesn't do the core thing I want to buy it for.
Here's how I'd like it to work:
Step 1) I sign up and give my credit card details immediately. (I would have trusted you with a money back guarantee)
Step 2) I connect my Stripe account and you instantly show me a list of invoices I can download or email to customers.
Step 3) I change my company details until invoices are rendered correctly.
No step 4 or 5.
An extra bit of logic which would be fine for my immediate purposes:
- When I add my UK/EU VAT registration number include VAT, at the UK rate, on all invoices where Stripe reports that country of the customer to be an EU country.
e.g.
A $50 payment in Stripe from someone in the UK, France etc should result in an invoice for $41.67 + $8.33 VAT
A $50 payment in Stripe from someone in the US, Canada etc should result in an invoice for $50 + $0.00 VAT
(Once we hit significant revenue we might need something more complex but right now all I care about is making sure we're properly accounting for VAT.)
Brilliant idea! I very much hope all this is helpful.
Metadata are optional. You only have to use them if you need to add extra info, like VAT rates.
I see you include the VAT on the final amount. But there are some people who prefer to add the VAT to the final amount if needed. In your case, $60 for EU customers and $50 for non-EU customers. With the use of metadata, the user decides which logic he prefers.
Thanks for all your feedback! There are some really interesting and useful ideas. Hope to give you some good news soon ;-)
On the VAT rate it wouldn't matter which way I (or other customers) preferred to do it. That decision would have already been made when the payment was taken otherwise I'd have to process another payment via Stripe - very messy for accounting. The example could have also been:
A $60 payment in Stripe from someone in the UK, France etc should result in an invoice for $50 + $10 VAT
A $50 payment in Stripe from someone in the US, Canada etc should result in an invoice for $50 + $0.00 VAT
Something like this should do the trick (I guess you have the second half of this already):
def get_tax_amount(stripe_payment)
if stripe_payment.metadata.tax.nil?
if customer.auto_eu_vat_on? && EU_COUNTRY_CODES.include?(stripe_payment.country_code)
return stripe_payment.amount * (EU_VAT_RATES[customer.country_code]/100)
end
else
return 0.0
end
else
return stripe_payment.amount * (stripe_payment.metadata.tax/100)
end
end
The only cases I can think of that would require metatdata are:
1) A $60 payment in Stripe from someone in Germany where the company's EU VAT number is provided in metadata should result in an invoice for $60 + $0.00 VAT
2) If I'm selling products that have different VAT rates. That's unlikely if your market is primarily software / digital products like Stripe's market.
I'd recommend against price per invoice. Most businesses prefer fixed, predictable costs for things like this.
Also for the price of Quaderno you could just buy http://xero.com and get a lot more features. They too do Stripe invoicing.