Paying, invoices and VAT

You pay for a plan from Settings, tab Plan. Everything about the money itself, the details on your invoices and the invoices you have had, lives next to it under Billing.

Only you can reach both pages. An administrator of Taskstand who is signed in as your account to look at a support question cannot open them, and cannot start, change or cancel a payment.

Before you pay#

Fill in your billing details under Settings, tab Billing: the company, the name, the address and the country. Company and name are separate fields and one of the two is enough, so a company with a contact person fills in both and a freelancer without a company name fills in one. The country decides which VAT applies, so it is asked rather than guessed.

If you are a business elsewhere in the EU, fill in your VAT number as well. It is checked with the European VIES service:

• Confirmed: the VAT on your invoices is reverse charged to you, so you pay the amount without VAT. The page then also shows the name and address the EU has registered under that number, so you can see it is the right company. Not every member state discloses that, and nothing is copied from it.
• Not confirmed: VAT is charged for now. The service of a member state is regularly busy for a moment, and that comes back as "not confirmed" rather than as "wrong", so save the page again later and it is checked once more.

A Dutch VAT number is confirmed in the same way, but nothing is shifted: in the Netherlands you pay Dutch VAT.

The country in your VAT number has to be the country you picked, or it is not accepted.

Your postcode is checked against the way the country you picked writes them, so a typo is caught before it ends up on an invoice, and it is stored the way that country writes it. Countries that have no postcodes are not asked for one. The address itself is not looked up anywhere: what matters for VAT is the country, and the payment itself says that.

Paying#

1. Open Settings, tab Plan.
2. Pick Per month or Per year. A year costs ten months.
3. Press the button under the plan you want.
4. Pay at our payment provider, with iDEAL, a card or one of the other methods offered there.

You come back to the plan page, which says your payment is being processed. That page asks the payment provider how it went, and the provider also tells us by itself, so your plan changes as soon as the money comes through, usually within a minute. Coming back is not the same as having paid, which is why the page waits for the payment itself rather than for your browser.

Paying gives an authorisation to collect the next period automatically, so you never have to think about it again. The first payment ends your trial, because you are now on the plan you chose.

Switching plans#

You switch on the plan page, with the button under another plan.

• Moving up starts right away. You pay the difference for the days that are left of the period you already paid for, and the next full payment is on the date it was already going to be. A small difference is collected straight from the authorisation you gave, after you tick a box that names the amount. A larger one goes through the payment provider, where you pick how you pay and approve it yourself, and the change goes through as soon as that payment comes in. Abandon that payment and nothing changes at all.
• Moving down starts when the period you paid for ends. Until then nothing changes, and there is no refund for what is left, because you keep using what you paid for.

Switching between per month and per year works the same way: it takes effect when the current period ends.

Cancelling#

On the plan page, press Cancel subscription in the block about your subscription, or Go back to free under the free plan. Both do the same thing. Nothing is collected again and nothing is deleted. Your account keeps the plan until the period you paid for is over, and after that it continues on Free. Your projects, hours and files stay where they are.

Changed your mind? As long as the period is still running, the Resume button at your plan on the plan page puts the subscription back from the date it would have ended, without paying again now. You can also switch to another plan from there.

You can pay again at any time, and the projects that were out of reach come back as they were.

When a payment fails#

If a payment cannot be collected, you get an email about it and the plan page says so. Nothing is taken away at that moment: your plan runs to the end of the period you already paid for, and a week past it, because a payment by direct debit takes a few working days to come in. Pay again from the plan page within that week and everything carries on.

Money that goes back#

If you have a direct debit taken back at your bank, the period it paid for was not paid after all. The subscription stops, your account goes to Free straight away, you get an email about it, and a credit note for the amount appears with your invoices. Choose a plan again to continue.

When we pay something back ourselves, you get a credit note for exactly that amount and your subscription carries on as it was.

Your invoices#

Every payment gets an invoice, under Settings, tab Billing. Each one can be downloaded as a pdf and carries the number, the date, both addresses, the period, the VAT and the total.

An invoice is frozen the moment it is written. Correcting your address later changes the invoices that follow, never the ones already sent, which is what an invoice has to do. Invoices are kept for seven years, because the tax office asks for that.

How VAT is worked out#

Prices are shown and invoiced excluding VAT. Which rate you pay follows your country:

Where you are	What you pay
The Netherlands	21% VAT
The EU, with a confirmed VAT number	no VAT, reverse charged to you
The EU, without a confirmed VAT number	21% VAT
Outside the EU	no VAT

The payment itself says something about where you are too: iDEAL is a Dutch scheme, Bancontact a Belgian one, a bank account carries its country, and a card says where it was issued. We write that down next to what you filled in and leave your address alone, because where you bank is not where you live and plenty of people pay from another country for reasons of their own.

It does one thing: a country outside the EU does not buy the zero rate when the payment came from inside the EU. In that one case VAT is charged after all, from the next payment on. The invoice that was already paid stays as it was.

See also Plans and limits for what each plan carries and how projects, people and files are counted.