We hear from Eric Larson, founder of Golden Channels, a company that designs and manufactures marine cable systems for the recreational fishing industry, on their mission to deliver top-class customer satisfaction to the clients they serve around the world.
What are the problems we solve for Golden Channels?
- Remove complexity in their VAT compliance process for European sales orders.
- Remove uncertainty with instant access to online filings status and overall Net VAT position.
- Deliver secure integration with Golden Channels WooCommerce webstore.
We built a global business engineering connectivity between multiple tracking and navigation devices on fishing boats. We are all about integration and leveraging existing technologies to make them work together better. Taxmatic uses data direct from our webstore and takes care of the VAT process with zero lift from us. It makes perfect sense.
Eric began exploring a way to switch their VAT management process to an automated system in 2023. The team at Taxmatic responded with their open API connection Word-press sites with checkouts built on the WooCommerce open-source platform. The onboarding team provisioned a new Taxmatic account, enabling the secure connection to their online webstore to start the flow sales order data in real time and align VAT charges to local and OSS (One Stop Shop scheme) European VAT filings.
“Everything, from store order to VAT remittance can be viewed online. Date stamps, records, messages, we see everything and never have to download up upload a spreadsheet at any stage in the process.”
What’s changing in the VAT Compliance service space for B2C Sellers?
European tax authorities have steadily invested in online tax return services for individuals and businesses and the speed of this transition is increasing right across the continent.
For B2C eCommerce sellers, staying on top of changes in rules, rates and types of VAT compliance can seem an endless task.
Eric was looking for an automated solution that could handle changes in VAT rates and rules when selling equipment to customers in the UK or across the European Union. Having in app messaging not only speeds up query resolution but also adds to the audit trail for any future responses required by EU or local tax authorities across all 27 member states.
We can customise our reporting views and drill in where the Taxmatic customer service team highlight a potential problem. They’ve got our back with proactive comms and updates.
Connecting a WooCommerce online store
Sellers who have developed their online business model with open-source platforms and technologies will appreciate the fast, straightforward Taxmatic connection with a quick two-step process.
With an Taxmatic account provisioned, the client adds their WooCommerce webstore URL for validation. This triggers an approval request on the clients WooCommerce webstore account to grant access for secure read-only data transfer for sales transactions to the Taxmatic platform.
Intuitive UX
With WooCommerce authorisation completed, sales order data will flow through the Taxmatic calculation process and generate reports for filings that align to the VAT compliance requirements of each individual client.
There are three main types of VAT filings for sellers – Local, IOSS or OSS schemes. The combination of filing types depends on the logistics channels used for each individual business model.
Taxmatic organises VAT filings in separate reports that sellers can easily toggle between for instant visibility. Local tax returns – where sellers hold stock within a specific country and sell the products in that country – appear on the Local VAT view.
Where a seller uses the Import One-Stop-Shop scheme – designed to simplify VAT returns when drop shipping products directly into EU markets from locations outside the EU – the transactions and filings information is available on the IOSS view. Likewise, the same approach applied of OSS returns where goods are shipped to multiple countries from warehouse locations within the EU.
Online Reporting and Dashboards
For many sellers, the process of VAT calculations and filings can appear opaque and cumbersome. The benefits of a clear dashboard view of net VAT position will help online sellers with one of the more important aspects of their business, cash flow management. All VAT charges, pending payments and any refunds are visible from a single online view. This transparency also helps the second major concern with tax obligations – certainty of on-time filings with correct rates applied and any overpayments corrected with refund claims. Keeping costs to a minimum and removing doubt from the process are the dual benefits that many sellers, like Golden Channels, can depend on.
