For Profit Company

This is a living document. Please fill in technical and non-technical ideas and suggestions.

As we are a for profit company we need to find a good and simple solution for handling and invoicing our paid features both technically and communicatively.

For our paid features we need to find out how invoicing should technically work.

This needs technical and procedural development and should be aimed at automation from the get go.

Our owner handling/invoicing database is 'guardians'

Here are some initial thoughts.

Currency

Until we are big enough to be legally forced to use domestic VAT and taxes I suggest we keep everything in Euro invoiced from Switzerland.

VAT

Swiss VAT for now

If they are a company 0% VAT

If they are not a company 8.1% VAT

We have VAT on group level which in turn means we probably need two groups (0 and 8.1) for each service we sell, and further with two different price amounts (since we include VAT in the price)

How to invoice and pay

First question: Do we zero-invoice? Ie do we send a regular invoice of zero to the owner on a free tier. I would say we do.

1. We have discussed that our price strategy should be a cut of the fee on used services. Ie an overhead on the SMS/email fee and a percentage of the online payment fee

2. Alternatively we take a fixed fee

3. How does the owner pay

4. Technical payment solution

Ref 1

Pros: We have a fixed price per end user which we can add to their invoice\

Cons:

• The technical challenges are rather big

• We need to calculate everything live in the individual transaction

• We need a system to deduct the used amount from the owners paid amount Note: I imagine we can do this by registering the owner on an activity with price zero (best way of invoicing an amount then?), invoice 100, owner pays +100, owner sells a service with fee 5, and we set a new payment of -5. Total left is then 95. We have to joggle in several databases on each transaction.

• We need to add an amount to the end-user invoice

• We need to hold the money for the owner

• We need to divide the revenue in 'ours' and 'theirs' in different bank accounts

• We need payouts for the owner

Ref 2

Pros: The technical challenges are minor

Cons: We do not have an exact amount to add to the end-user invoice

Ref 3

Up front payment by the owner

Pros: Good cash flow for us

Cons: Owner does not like to pay for the service, further enhanced by it being a 'big' number

Added fee from 'us' to the end-user. Ie ticket price 100 for the owner, plus say 5% for us - End-user pays 105.

Pros: Owner mentally sees our service as 'free'

Cons:

• Potentially poor cash flow for us

• The end-user might find this a poor solution

Ref 4

First out SEPA payments to our Swiss IBAN account number.

Second, implement online payment services directly in the platform.

Pros: Easy for the customer

Cons: We probably need domestic accounts/cards, which we do not have ATM