Two major issues with regulations
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First of all, thank you for providing this plugin for free! However, there are two major issues regarding EU regulations compliance.
1.) Reverse charge invoices, ie. EU B2B transactions, if both the seller and the buyer have a valid VAT ID, MUST have a note on them stating that it’s a reverse charge invoice. See https://english.bmf.gv.at/taxation/Invoicing.html#Points_to_note_when_invoicing_under_the_reverse_charge_system .. This is a requirement in every EU country and your plugin doesn’t add this note.
2.) Duplicate invoice numbers. If I manually add an order from the backend, it doesn’t automatically create an invoice. When you click “generate invoice” after entering the next subsequent invoice number, it does create the invoice. But now, as soon as a client orders via the front end, it creates another invoice with the SAME number. According to EU regulations, invoice numbers must always be subsequent and you can’t just generate invoice with the same number either obviously. So your plugin has to check if an invoice with the same number already exists, and if it does it has to pick the next subsequent number and NOT create another invoice with the same number.
Both issues are super important and without these invoices aren’t compliant and you end up with issues with your tax office. Good news is that both should be relatively easy to fix though.
Looking forward to your response so I don’t have to switch to a different plugin.
Cheers!
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Thanks for getting in touch. What you describe is correct, but they are not issues in the plugin. To be more specific, the EU VAT Assistant does not affect the generation of invoices, and it doesn’t determine what’s written on them, or their number.
Below, you can find some information on how you can address the issues you listed.
1. Reverse charge note
To add the “reverse charge” notes, as well as the exchange rate applied for currency conversion (if needed), you will have to customise your invoice template (the PDF Invoices and Packing Slips plugin allows for such customisation). If you use a plugin like WooCommerce PDF Invoices, which provides hooks to add custom information on the invoice, then you can intercept such events and append the required information.The EU VAT Assistant provides functions for this purpose, you will just have to call them. If you would like to know the details of how the functions work, we can send you some examples of how to call the functions to fetch the relevant information.
If you need assistance implementing such customisation, you can contact us and we can give you a quote for it.
The reason why the EU VAT Assistant doesn’t alter the invoices is that different invoicing plugins work in a different way and there isn’t a “universal” solution for that. As with any free pluginm we must keep the maintenance to the minimum, therefore we decided to allow users to customise the invoices as they please, rather than trying to cover all the various invoicing plugins on the market.
Also, it’s important to note that this kind of customisations, as well as the paid support plans, are what allows us to distribute the EU VAT Assistant free of charge. If we were to add more integrations and features to it, then we would be forced to put a price tag on the plugin (with a paid “pro” version, also known as the “freemium” model), like the alternative solutions do, to cover development and maintenance costs.
2. Invoice numbering
The issue of duplicate invoice numbers is unrelated to the EU VAT Assistant. Our plugin has no role in determining the invoice number. If you see that invoices are created with duplicate numbers, you should contact the author of the invoicing plugin you are using, as that could be due to a bug in that plugin.
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