European VAT Compliance Assistant for WooCommerce v1.36.0

**The European/UK VAT (IVA) laws**

Since January 1st 2015, all digital goods (including electronic, telecommunications, software, ebook and broadcast services), and from 1st July 2021 physical goods sold across EU and UK borders have been liable under law to variable VAT (a.k.a. IVA) charged in the country of purchase, at the VAT rate of that country (background information: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2016-09/explanatory_notes_2015_en.pdf). This can apply even if the seller is not based in the EU or UK. It is accompanied by various auditing/recording requirements.

**How this plugin can take away the pain**

This WooCommerce plugin provides features to assist with EU, UK, Norwegian and Swiss VAT law compliance. Currently, those features include:

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Identify your customers’ locations: this plugin will record evidence of your customer’s location, using their billing or shipping address, and their IP address (via a GeoIP lookup).

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Evidence is recorded, ready for audit: full information that was used to calculate VAT and customer location is displayed in the WooCommerce order screen in the back-end.

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Display prices including correct VAT from the first page: GeoIP information is also used to show the correct VAT from the first time a customer sees a product. A widget and shortcode are also provided allowing the customer to set their own country.

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Currency conversions: Most users (if not everyone) will be required to report VAT information in a specific currency. This may be a different currency from their shop currency. This feature causes conversion rate information to be stored together with the order, at order time. Currently, you can choose from official rates from the European Central Bank (ECB), Danish and Czech National Banks, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, and HM Customs & Revenue (UK). You can also over-ride the currency and rate-provider on a per-country basis.

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Entering and maintaining each country’s VAT rates: this plugin assists with entering EU and/or UK VAT rates accurately by supplying a single button to press in your WooCommerce tax rates settings, to add or update rates for all countries (standard or reduced) with one click.

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Reporting: Advanced reporting capabilities, allowing you to see all the information needed to make a OSS/MOSS/IOSS (one-stop shop) VAT report. The report is sortable and broken down by country, VAT rate, VAT type (traditional/variable) and order status, and can be exported as a CSV.

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Forbid vatable sales if any goods have VAT chargeable — for shop owners for whom VAT compliance is too burdensome, this feature will allow you to forbid customers from configured VAT territories to check-out if they have selected any goods which are subject to VAT (whilst still allowing purchase of other goods, unlike the built-in WooCommerce feature which allows you to forbid check-out from some countries entirely).

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Central control: brings all settings, reports and other information into a single centralised location, so that you don’t have to deal with items spread all over the WordPress dashboard.

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Mixed shops: You can sell goods subject to your chosen territories’ VAT under the customer-place-of-supply regulations and any other physical goods which are subject to traditional base-country-based VAT regulations. The plugin supports this via allowing you to identify which tax classes in your WooCommerce configuration are used for customer-place-of-supply items. Products are allocated to the correct country according to which country VAT is payable to.

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Distinguish VAT from other taxes: if you are in a jurisdiction where you have to apply other taxes also, then this plugin can correctly distinguish which taxes are payable to which jurisdictions.

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Add line to invoices: If VAT was paid on the order, then an extra, configurable line can be added to the footer of the PDF invoice (when using the the free WooCommerce PDF invoices and packing slips plugin, or its premium counterpart).

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Refund support: includes information on refunded VAT, on relevant orders.

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Same prices: Not strictly a VAT compliance issue (different pricing per-country is not illegal), but this plugin adds an option to enable WooCommerce’s hidden support for adjusting pre-tax prices to enable the same post-tax (net) price to apply in all customer locations.

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Brexit-ready: The plugin has been audited and appropriately adapted to be usable by both «EU 27» and UK (and other) countries after the expiry of the EU and UK’s transitional period (at the end of December 2020), including the ability to report taxes in multiple currencies using different exchange rate providers. Existing users should take the time to go through their existing settings to adapt to their new situation (e.g. remove tax table entries for countries that they are no longer required to remit taxes to; check that they are using the correct exchange rate provider and reporting currency for...