It came to my attention after setting up everything on Stripe and implementing it on my Ghost(Pro) site that the required code snippet Stripe provides to enable StripeTax isn’t easily supported.
It appears that, at least from what I could find in other posts here on the forum over the few years it’s been mentioned in various ways, that modifying the payment portal in such a way is beyond that of theme editing. As such, I would suggest it become a toggle or admin-panel level input to implement.
Without this function, maintaining proper tax records and compliance via Stripe is close to impossible or at the very least significantly more time consuming than with it - to the point that unless someone is willing to forgo proper tax compliance in many regions, Ghost’s intrinsic membership payment integration - especially for Ghost(Pro) users, is all but useless.
Tax compliance is a nightmare for membership sites to begin with given the nature of subscribers being able to be from anywhere globally, and so while it’s great Stripe bought up a company to integrate their (still imperfect but better than nothing) solution to create StripeTax, not having that easily incorporated on the Ghost side is a misstep for certain. This would be a welcome change.
This is a great idea and totally agree. I myself have been doing a workaround for this - for all new members I need to enable tax on their stripe accounts manually. And because it isn’t the default option for new subscribers, unfortunately their first invoice is always incorrect. This update process is also time consuming and open to errors. Additionally, as you have alluded to, this also makes the ongoing tracking of tax that is payable very tricky. Any new customers whose invoices were missed for stripe tax need to be manually adjusted for when you return your GST/VAT.
I am tempted to modify the Ghost code myself, but worried that this could cause problems (and isn’t a great solution as I will have to modify the code when ever updates are done.
If I understand the documentation and other posts on the forum correctly, what is needed is to be able to set the parameter “automatic_tax[enabled]”=true for stripe invoicing. In ghost currently by default it is set to false.
I’m surprised more people don’t face this issue? I’m based in NZ, where are tax rules are less complex, but nonetheless we are required to collect tax on any sales made by customers in our tax jurisdiction. I only imagine it is significantly harder/impossible when state taxes are involved.
Any solutions the team or community might have to this would be much appreciated.
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