With payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request treated separately and results in 10k invoices? Will CloudFlare handle this for me?
Who do you invoice if, for example, you own a vending machine that sells chips and sodas for cash or contactless? Why couldn’t this be treated the same?
Vending machines can't be used by thousands of people from differing tax jurisdictions at once
Airports could potentially be such a place but I admit that this is a bit contrived.
Airports are such a place. That is why they have duty-free stores that are exempt from taxes so long as you take the goods out of the country. The onus is on the consumer to pay taxes at their destination.
Most countries then have a "personal exemption", where consumers are exempt from paying taxes on a certain value of goods.
Not really because the transaction occurs in a specific place with specific tax rules, regardless of where the purchaser is from.
Normal vending machine transactions are B2C transactions, so the buyer cannot be a company - cannot pay with company money and cannot deduce the payment as the company cost. I guess, the buyer can take a receipt from a vending machine and ask the vending machine owner to provide a B2B invoice based on the receipt, to make this a proper B2B payment.
Can you treat your remote service access as B2C only? Perhaps yes, but then the companies will not be able to use your service, pay from a company bank account and account this as a company cost, only individuals will be able to legally pay.
Vending machine is also located in a known physical country, so the owner knows what VAT to apply, the VAT of the country the machine is in. With software services the VAT should be applied based on the country where the buyer is located.
Retailers selling for cash typically don't have the same accounting requirements for revenue from cash sales.
No KYC needed, no counterparty or reciprocal VAT rules, no jurisdiction tax rules, etc. Non-cash revenue has rules attached to it.
I agree with GP - this doesn't actually solve any problems I have when recording revenue.
> Will CloudFlare handle this for me?
Right i wondered the same. I guess Cloudflare would have to act as a Merchant of Record, like e.g. Paddle and Gumroad do. Then the end user/bot would do business with Cloudflare, and Cloudflare with us.
Seems like a good avenue for money laundering if you can't tell where it comes from.