That won't get you a VAT ID, which is the key thing he says he needs to be able to bill people outside of Germany. It is significantly cheaper than 9k EUR and faster than 6 months to get in the UK, however.
That won't get you a VAT ID, which is the key thing he says he needs to be able to bill people outside of Germany. It is significantly cheaper than 9k EUR and faster than 6 months to get in the UK, however.
It is free to become VAT registered and only takes a few days for the VAT number to be assigned and posted to you.
Do you really need a VAT ID though? There is the “reverse charge” mechanism, which IIRC you can use until you sell a lot in any given country. (IANAL)
It is somewhat annoying dealing with accounting and reporting for reverse VAT as a customer.
Not a dealbreaker in itself, but the sort of little thing you don't want to build a stack of. Shady PO-box address, Yahoo contact email, expired ssl certificates etc.
Both parties having a VAT ID is actually a requirement to be able to use reverse charge: https://vatdb.com/reverse-charge/
Okay, it’s way more complicated than I imagined then!
But if you’re not liable for VAT in a given EU country yet, I suppose you can then just skip it? There are some countries with low thresholds (like 15k € in Cyprus or 0 € in Belgium) but if you’re keep clear of those, do not cross thresholds anywhere, and are doing B2B only, you’re in the clear, right?