Comment to 'VERY IMPORTANT: Customer Tax ID'
Comment to VERY IMPORTANT: Customer Tax ID

  • Hi @thomlin

    Sorry but I am fraid that you completely misunderstood my question to @Anton L.

    I am not talking about paying, calculating or deducting a VAT. I am asking about how to display a Customer's Tax ID on the Invoice and Receipt documents which is a requirement in some countries whether that customer is an individual/person or company/business. It's a strategy found by many governments to fight tax evasion and fraud.

    Stripe has already that option in its API. Please refer to the link I shared in my post above. Stripe can display the customer's tax ID in the header of the invoice and receipt along with the Full Name, Billing address, Email address.

    UNA has a organization profile module for business/entities. So let's say, if you are running an UNA website or business/company that operates within the European Union and offer whatever paid service (Membership upgrade, Credits, Points, Advertising etc) to another European Union-based business, you are bound by the the European Union Law to display their VAT in the Invoice and Receipt. Did you know that?

    Same applies in countries like Brazil (to both Individuals and businesses). Yes in Brazil, it is not permitted to issue an invoice or receipt without displaying the customer's Tax ID on it no matter whether that customer is a person or a business. I bed that applies to many other contries as well. I am still searching about it.

    Sure VAT is for businesses in the EU but in some other countries both Individuals (natural persons) and Business (entities) have a Tax Id. It is just called differently in different countries.

    E.g: U.S. taxpayer identification numbers include a Social Security Number (SSN) or Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) which is issued to individuals, and an Employer Identification Number (EIN), which is issued to individuals or entities.

    Brazilian taxpayer identification numbers include CPF for individuals and CNPJ for entities.

    Other countries also have their taxpayer identification numbers.

    Although some contries like USA, Canada etc do not require you to put the Customer's Tax ID on the invoice and receipt documents, some others like countries in the European Union (for the invoice to enties/businesses - VAT), Brazil (for the invoice to both individuals - CPF and entities - CNPJ) etc do.

    That feature (functionality) is already available in Stripe and Paypal API. We just need to enable it in their integration with UNA. Also we need to find a way to collect it from the member in the UNA platform (maybe as an input field from the profile creation page or the account edit page)

    Hope it makes sense now.

    Thanks

    • T

      Yes, I understand. It needs though some clarification. Payment services do not collect data from form input fields in UNA. It collects data from its own checkout page which gets integrated in UNA with payments module, because that critical data has to be encrypted when it's sent back to their systems. By extending the services, for example with tax service, the form extends as well, with all the necessary data input fields the customer has to fill in once, in that case a field for tax id or company name, etc., which then gets automatically validated before it is sent back to the service payment provider and saved in their highly secured databases for your further use.

      • Thanks for your reply.

        Collecting the customer's Tax ID is the responsibility of the seller, not the payment gateway. It's the customer who has to provide it to the seller. It is done on the seller's website and stored in the database, usually via an Input field, not on the Payment gateway's checkout page.

        In the link I shared above, Stripe has clearly said:

        You’re responsible for the accuracy of customer information including their tax ID number. The invoice includes the customer tax ID whether or not it’s valid.

        If it had to be done on the checkout page, then members would have needed to enter it everytime they needed to order something.

        UNA platform already passes many information (Full name, email address, product name and ID etc) to the payment service provider services through the API integration. All those information are safely stored in the UNA database. So collecting and storing the customer's Tax ID in the database then passing it to the payment service provider should not be a big deal with UNA. That's what API is for.

        Please do not confuse the customer's account information stored on the seller's website (full name, billing address, email address etc) and which are passed to Payment service provider for the creation of the invoice and the receipt with the payment method information collected by the Payment Gateway on the checkout page (e.g. Name on the credit card, credit card number etc). They are two different sets of data.

        By the way, all the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc, coltect the customer's Tax ID on their platform using an input field and store it in their database.