Accounting Entries For Subscriptions (EU)

Hi everyone,

I’m in the process of creating a membership site, however am wondering how I will declare revenue in the EU.

Do I have to record each monthly subscriber payment separately? How do I charge VAT for EU subscribers?

I don’t have subscribers yet, so I cannot see if I can separate EU from non-EU subscribers. Any advice is appreciated - thank you!

If your audience is businesses, then you will have to create invoices. This is optional for private sales. However, in both cases you will have to declare taxes. The stripe payment is always the gross payment (incl. VAT). If you sell 10€ in Germany for example, that´s only 8,40€ net + 1,60€ VAT. This should be calculated in your pricing. There is no option to add VAT at a later stage.

Stripe does offer a taxation automation, if you want (https://stripe.com/tax). This is still way cheaper than Patreon. I am doing this whole process (invoicing, taxes) outside of stripe and manually, but I only have customers in one country.

Thank you very much for your reply. It looks like I will have to do manual invoicing on my accounting software while accounting for VAT for EU customers. Obviously these are not for customers, only for the tax authorities. I can also put those invoices on repeat for long-term subscribers but will have to manually stop the service if they unsubscribe. Unless I build a custom integration with Stripe and my accounting software (Elorus) it looks like this is how I will have to handle these transactions.