Is VATMOSS more complicated for small merchants in the EU than it is for foreign merchants that sell online into the EU?
I work for the latter kind of merchant, and "complexity" is not a word I would associate with VATMOSS. Here is what we've had to do to deal with VATMOSS:
• Register with the tax authority in a country that was part of VATMOSS. We registered with Ireland. We did this online via the Irish tax authority's web site. It took something like 15-30 minutes.
• Collect VAT. VAT rates are country wide and don't change very often so it is easy to simply have a rate table in our database. No need to integrate any third party paid tax processing API into our checkout process.
Once a month I run a script that uses a free API from apilayer.com to get the rates for each country and tell me if any do not match the rates in our database, but that's just because I'm lazy. :-) It's not much work to just manually search to find news of upcoming VAT rate changes.
• At the start of each quarter we have to report how much we sold and how much VAT we collected for each country. I run a script I wrote that generates a CSV file with that data from our database. We upload it to the Irish tax authority's web site and send them the total VAT. They deal with distributing the data and money to the other countries.
It was a bit more complicated before Brexit. Back then we made the mistake of picking the UK as our country to register with. Instead of going online by making a web-based way to do things like Ireland did, the UK did it by making available OpenOffice versions of their paper forms for download. You could download those, edit them to contain your information, and then upload them.
I work for the latter kind of merchant, and "complexity" is not a word I would associate with VATMOSS. Here is what we've had to do to deal with VATMOSS:
• Register with the tax authority in a country that was part of VATMOSS. We registered with Ireland. We did this online via the Irish tax authority's web site. It took something like 15-30 minutes.
• Collect VAT. VAT rates are country wide and don't change very often so it is easy to simply have a rate table in our database. No need to integrate any third party paid tax processing API into our checkout process.
Once a month I run a script that uses a free API from apilayer.com to get the rates for each country and tell me if any do not match the rates in our database, but that's just because I'm lazy. :-) It's not much work to just manually search to find news of upcoming VAT rate changes.
• At the start of each quarter we have to report how much we sold and how much VAT we collected for each country. I run a script I wrote that generates a CSV file with that data from our database. We upload it to the Irish tax authority's web site and send them the total VAT. They deal with distributing the data and money to the other countries.
It was a bit more complicated before Brexit. Back then we made the mistake of picking the UK as our country to register with. Instead of going online by making a web-based way to do things like Ireland did, the UK did it by making available OpenOffice versions of their paper forms for download. You could download those, edit them to contain your information, and then upload them.