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Comment by spintin | Hacker News Reader

You should never build your own billing system because you do not want to do the global VAT work.

itch.io is a good alternative if you sell digital assets and even services as you can verify payments with mail.

You build things yourself because A: you really like doing that (that is a hobby thing, not something to run a business on); B: you are really good at it and so have made it a core business item you use to make money (you are selling your system to others) C: you can't trust anyone else to do it.

In finance C is a big one! A bad billing system can kill you, and so despite the complexity it might be worth doing just because you now are in control. If you choose to buy a billing system anyway, you still need to understand how it works in enough detail to audit it. A corrupt billing system can hide how it is siphoning your money away and the numbers seem to balance and so you don't realize it is at fault. A bad billing system will not apply some tax it should and when you fail an audit the government will demand you pay - the unexpected bill will kill you. There are many variations on both of the above. You need to audit your systems to ensure they don't happen to you.

Despite the above I generally would suggest you buy a billing system not build your own. However that doesn't absolve you from understanding billing in enough detail to audit yours on a high level. You also need to select one that your independent auditors (which might be too expensive to have but you really want) can audit in whatever detail needed.

You generally hire third party auditors at scale.

I agree you should use an existing system and learn it well, so you can audit.

Good idea, but you need to audit your auditors.

> C: you can't trust anyone else to do it

Services are also mostly made for the average user, and that average user is never you.

My shameful secret as a small US-based company is that nothing happens if you don't do the VAT work. You just get email from irate Germans sometimes.

There's a form and you put in all the VAT information of the foreign countries. You need their VAT numbers though.

That's how it works in Germany.

And I'm not running a shop, just for Google Adsense.

It's just normal procedure. You have to keep all invoices for several years, 1 out of 365 days I do the yearly tax. It's just part of running a business.

I really want one for physical goods. The global sales/vat network is a nightmare to navigate for a small business.

I encountered this recently when I set up dolibarr for my restaurant in Taiwan. We have VAT in Taiwan but I feel like nobody actually knows how VAT is supposed to work. Sometimes a shop will charge us VAT, sometimes not, but what never happens is seeing VAT on your bill as a consumer, which means that every B2C in the country, other than Uber Eats, is eating the VAT. I assume. Or everyone's committing tax fraud all the way up the chain. Honestly both are just as likely.

If dolibarr didn't have auto handling for it I would have encountered it for the first time in my own program and instantly thrown my hands in the air and just done paper ledgers. I can't even imagine coding around it.

The point of VAT (…in EU) in B2C is that the B eats the VAT. You’ll see the VAT-less subtotal on receipts - but prices on shelves are strictly including VAT.

Of course unless you only have a select number of customers, all or most in your country.

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