Based in AU - selling international tax bookkeeping?

[svalkyrie23]

I want to sell to international markets on my shopify store and wanted to see how everyone monitors the bookkeeping and files international taxes for all different countries? It’s really intimidating so much so that I just want to stick with Australia but will be missing out on alot of sales?

If someone from Japan/Europe etc orders my product don’t I need to ensure im tax registered in that persons country?

I am using a POD company that would ship from the country closest to the customer

[TeemuEAS]

Hi Svalkyrie23

There are quite a few issues here, but lets start with the accounting. At bare minimum, you need a line with sales (0%) and taxes collected. Since we do assume you will collect the taxes to improve customer purchasing experience? For example Delivered Duty Paid = courier invoices you or in case of EU IOSS = your IOSS intermediary like EAS Project would invoice you. You can find more detailed instructions for Xero and Quickbooks in our Help Centre (easproject.com). 

POD is more problematic in Europe at least. Once they invoice you and ship to end-customer, it creates a warehouse for you in that country. And warehousing goods in Europe ALWAYS requires a VAT registration in that country. And since with most PODs you cannot limit the production facilities, you need to have a VAT registration in each one of them... consider registration in the region of 350€, possible fiscal representative  (not always needed) ~1 000€ annually and 150€ / month and you have an idea why their own tax advise is obscure. 

Add to that the biggest problem: non-EU companies without any VAT registration in EU and they will report your sale using their own VAT registrations. And, using the values they charge you, not the correct sales value. Resulting in serious under-payment, which also has another name...

Even if you collect VAT there is no mechanism for you to pay it to the EU tax administrations in those instances. As tax advisors, we do not recommend taking part in a scheme which is directly against the regulation. Consider UK VAT registration which does not require a fiscal representative or 3rd party, eases Low Value Consignment shipping from outside of UK to UK and warehousing in UK. I am happy to provide compliant companies. You can then sell to EU using IOSS and avoid the problem of multiple VAT registration and participation in a tax fraud 🙂 

More on our services: https://apps.shopify.com/eas-eu-compliance

(do check the reviews) 

[svalkyrie23]

Ahh this is a bit too complex for me 🙂 Im happy to avoid EU... but curious to know about how other people handle paying taxes for different countries.  I.e. to those reading this, if you're based in US, and you sell in UK, Australia, India, Japan etc... how are you navigating the taxes for these countries? do you have an app that states how much tax you need to take for each one, and then remit it automatically? or how are you remitting it manually for different countries?  OR because of tax treaties, do you just pay it to your local country (US) who then at tax time would pay it to those other countries.