Simplero is ready for the 2015 EU VAT MOSS/mess

Worried about the new EU VAT rules taking effect in 2015? I am too. It seems like such a burden, and it seems like our business in particular is targeted - an area where a lot of great innovation is happening. I'm sorry.

However, Simplero has you covered.

If you want to simply deny selling to countries is the EU, or - if you're in the EU - to EU countries other than your own - you can now do that. Under Settings > Taxes, you can define a tax region and set it to "deny sales" to that region. When that's set, we simply won't accept orders from those countries.

You can combine that with a new setting on the same page to force the country from IP address. We already (since yesterday) infer the customer's country based on their IP address. By checking this box, we also disallow the customer from changing this. So they can't change their country. Combined with the above, you can now reasonably effectively prevent selling to customers in the EU. There are a couple of downsides: Now you also cannot sell to non-EU citizens who happen to be traveling within the EU. And it's not 100% accurate. Sometimes it could get a border wrong, or people could use a VPN to cloak their country. But it's pretty good.

If, however, you do want to keep selling to customers in the EU, you have to charge the correct tax and record that. Simplero will do that for you. There's a new setting called "Automatically adjust settings to accommodate for new EU VAT starting January 1st, 2015". If this is checked, come January 1st, we'll automatically adjust your tax settings to collect the correct taxes for customers in the EU.

At this point, I haven't figured out how to possibly do the reporting for you automatically. I'm not sure we can. So you'd still have to register for VAT MOSS with a country within the EU and submit the reports. But at least we can provide you with the right data you need to submit, and we'll be collecting the correct taxes, as far as we understand, being software makers and not tax accountants. Especially since even tax accountants can properly figure all this stuff out.

All of this goodness is under Settings > Taxes.