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[Music] hey rachel thanks for joining me today please introduce yourself hi of course nathan thanks for having me um my name is rachel harding i'm the global tax director here at fast spring i've been here for almost two years a little bit of background i have about 10 11 years of tax experience spent my first five six years in public accounting kind of learning the ropes of taxation two years in m a before transitioning into industry worked at a crypto company before doing fast spring so we're gonna talk about taxes today which is uh one of those topics that people maybe don't talk about all the time but um but you and i've had several conversations about this and they've been fascinating to me so i hope that you will you will be um patient with me as i learn the ropes and hopefully like we can we can help give some people some information that they'll that'll help them with their sas businesses or their software businesses as well because it's there's all these things that i didn't know before before we started talking um so so here's question number one which is let let's say i have a sas company and i could be based anywhere in the world like give me an introduction right how should i start to think about like taxes in general what taxes do i need to be collecting and then remitting and like what am i responsible for so i think kind of the highlight the biggest highlight we want to kind of the messaging to get across for sas companies is it's going to be your transaction taxes their excise taxes what they are called is in the us it's really called sales tax and then internationally they go by many names but it's that value-added tax there's gst consumption tax at the end of the day they all really mean the same thing it's a tax on the consumer um the thing for companies for small sas companies it's the seller's obligation which means is that they're on the hook for making sure they're rolling it out correctly and being compliant although it is a tax on the customer it's the seller's responsibility so so if i have a sas company and somebody buys my product i'm responsible for collecting and remitting the taxes even though it's a tax on them correct because it's taxing their purchase that's that's right right yeah okay do it right technically it's a net zero to you because you're collecting the tax and then you're sending it to the government it's where you're doing it wrong that it becomes kind of this huge expense and can become a liability on your books because two years later you're not going to go assess a customer sales tax so all of that then becomes out of pocket like how do i know what i'm responsible for like what's the transaction percentage like who do i owe that money to how's that calculated good question so there are thousands of taxing jurisdictions across the world um but we'll kind of break it down and we'll break it down into two groups you have the us and then you have international um u.s is a little bit kind of specific because it's not a it's not up to the federal government it's up they leave it to the states and there's 45 states that have a sales tax regime so every state is going to have their own laws numbers etc blah blah blah what you really want to look at we can slice it down into activity into your sales there's usually some type of threshold countries more and more are dropping the threshold and they're saying every sale into this country is taxable but you want to look at taxability and then how much how many sales you have going into a country now what that means is where your end user is located um most countries will require two types of corroborating evidence to basically assert somebody is located here in a business sense that really means you use the billing address the ip address if you can flex those great um that's generally what most businesses do so the so it's the location of the buyer not my location yeah the it's kind of they where taxation occurs is where the benefit is consumed that's kind of the the taxable jargon what that means is where that item is going to be used um most of the time you know you buy software you're going to use it at your home or your office and that's tied to your address your your billing address your ip address interesting so that's that's a that's something i did not know before let me make sure i understand that so so if i go to the store like the to the supermarket and i buy just like a a piece of a piece of clothing or something that's that's taxable most like most food items are not taxable but say i pick something that would be taxable i'm going to pay that sales tax there and the sales tax is it's based on that jurisdiction where that business is located right correct but that's different than software because in software like you're buying off a website which doesn't really technically like like the business itself might be located somewhere but the consumption of the product is in all these different locations potentially all over the world right sure sure now there are some and you're totally right um physical products are usually going to go you look to the ship to address so when you're buying a physical product you go online and there's usually two different places you put in an address you have your ship to and then it says is your billing the same as your ship too physical products are going to be connected to your ship to address whereas if you translated that to a software sense it's going to be your build to address because there is no ship to address um that's just kind of the way it goes i remember way back when amazon this is like back in college i came from oregon i went to a school in california so all of my credit card information was still tied to oregon oregon doesn't have sales tax so i figured out i could buy all these things on amazon without getting sales tax assessed because they were using billing information sophomore junior year all of a sudden sales tax is being charged like uh amazon figured out hey if this is a tangible good we need to be taxing to the ship to address interesting very interesting so with software then the the corroborating evidence the way they figure out where that benefit is being consumed is ip and billing address right yeah i mean you have to look at what the data you have on file um it's at the end of the day there realistically you know you can't source every single person to where they're specifically using it so you have to kind of work with the data you have available but two readily available pieces are the billing and the ip address interesting so so you talked a little bit about the different kinds of taxes these are all we're talking about all sales related taxes right like that's yeah that's what we're talking about yep is there anything in addition to that well there's so many types of taxes that i won't bore you um but the reason it's at the buyer level is because of the sales tax um if you look at to where um this at the seller level those are gonna be things like your income tax your property tax um it the tax speaks to who and what gets taxed if that makes sense okay and but none of those are i don't have to worry about any of those from uh uh for when we're talking about the transactions happening on my sas website right yeah there are other things like you know invoicing requirements as we might discuss later there are kind of countries are rolling out e invoicing which is basically you have just in a real time um snip of the data on the transaction not just like a pdf of invoice there are other things like that but when it comes to the concern and kind of the calculation of taxes that's really um what you're looking at cool now you talk to these like taxing authorities all the time like i know you do because i have heard you in meetings i've heard doing meetings talk about interactions you've had with them like tell me tell me some stories like first of all so why what about your role here at fast spring sort of brings you into contact with all these these sort of taxing authorities from all over the world and what do they they like to deal with yeah and this i can say is kind of it's one of my favorite parts of the job actually when you you get to interface with them because at the end of their they're just real people doing their job um but i do put on my kind of professional tax hack um we are getting because we are function as the merchant of record we file in over 50 countries 45 states we should we should explain that right so for anybody who doesn't understand like rachel you and i both work for fast spring part of what we do is we sell software on behalf of of the companies that we work with therefore we become the people who collect and remit those sales taxes which means you end up talking to all of these different sales and tax authorities yeah and i mean i like to call us a reseller or marketplace facilitator you know like your amazon for e-commerce kind of digital goods so because our name is out there and on all the filings the payments we tend to get picked up in any kind of communications so we actually have a separate inbox for all the kind of spam from different jurisdictions that you kind of have to constantly monitor but i will say there's probably uh only 10 are gonna be actionable items so they send a lot of phishing emails that are kind of they're meant to be scary to kind of get you questioning things um but to a tax person i see that all the time this is a non-tax person would look at that and they've i've seen some like whoa is that a threat are they threatening me like um so you kind of gotta know what they're driving at and then the other ones are just you know inquiries where they're sometimes they just want to see some data maybe you know you underpaid and it's interests and penalties sometimes things get missed it's a misfiling um or you get selected for an audit and those are the ones that you have to constantly be watching for because you want to make sure you have a timely response and and you're making sure you're doing all things correctly on your end it goes very it goes a long way with the auditors um so i respond you know with not that week i try to do within three days once i get those inquiries um i've seen everything from you know a seasoned agent that he's burnt down he's ready to quit he's just like blah blah blah to who was a city chicago this guy was like fresh out of school and was just ready to rock and set he sent me 20 pages of questions i'm like are you kidding me but it's kind of part of the game is going through and um it show you want to make sure one that you know you've done your due diligence and you understand their rules and that you've looked at your business how it applies and then made a call documented it all your doctor in a row that's kind of that's really what they want to see for lack of a better word i'll say you don't want to get caught with your pants down they tend to come down hard on that because it shows that you just you didn't know what was going on you don't care um so it's it's more of like a it's more of like a dance it's not just so like here here's all our information you kind of paint the story because at the end of the day your business and you're in the business of doing everything but taxes that's just a side function um and they are realistic but you need to know like when to push when to back off yeah and these are all things that you do all the time um those they're gonna be talking to me right if i'm a sas owner and i'm trying to do this on my own they will come well somebody in your business so like if it's a state the states have really not migrated into email i know i know i still fax things all the time um you will get you'll get like a piece of paper in the mail so you know make sure you're using valid addresses most international countries do go through email i was on an email it was it was mexico they instead of like bc seeing everybody and you didn't see all the um email addresses they sent it out with everybody cc'd so i literally saw every company that was registered for tax like amazon paddle i was like oh psych somebody messed up are there are there countries so so you're talking to cities states and countries like the authorities in all these different places that have that have different types of sales tax or excise tax um are there any that are known to be extra proactive about enforcement yeah so it this is kind of what i think is um where the value add in kind of your merchant or record model is you get the best of both worlds you get somebody that understands the tax laws but also like i'm the first person to say hey don't register there unless you know it's truly a requirement and you've done a cost benefit analysis um your advisors are really gonna they're gonna say you have to file everywhere and do everything perfect and because they're your advisors um it's kind of the approach that you take as an in-house person to push back like i push back on them all the time and kind of consider what they have to say but is it realistic um what i spend most of my time i talk to them you know at least every other week most of my time is not the intricacies of understanding the tax but it's really seeing what's out there like they have other clients and they have you know firms around the world um and it's really like what are you seeing kind of what i'm seeing and it's that exchange of information that really helps us pinpoint on where the risk is for example saudi arabia was going around checking websites to make sure that people who were tax collectors were posting it on their website with their number so of course you know make sure and go check that out um uae for a while was really hitting um companies so it was we had already filed and registered there but it was they were seeing hits all across the board there are i kind of use my judgment but every once in a while i go running to product once i i kind of all right i'm seeing what's in the marketplace and i'm looking at where there are small holes kind of in our business or where our weak points are and that's when i go running to product and i'm like and we have an issue we have an issue um that we need to fix um it was just i mean we fixed um all of our kind of information reporting last year and that was purely based on what we were seeing in the industry um several large companies at within a month or two of each other went under audit um and that's i know that just from kind of our networks um so it's probably one of the most important parts of the business is seeing what's out there like who's going after what because you can pass a law all day but if you're not going to enforce it you're not going to get many people to comply right so so let's talk about that for a second because when you say fix i think i think what you mean is this stuff is changing all the time right and so part of your job is to stay ahead of it and to make sure that we're prepared for whatever the next thing coming in this world is and so there's there's like there's the laws and then there's like this huge area in the middle which is regulation and enforcement so um i'm skipping i'm skipping ahead in our outline slightly so like oh yeah just a little bit um this this is something we were going to talk about later but let's talk about it now which is um like how what is changing like when when things change how do they change um what are some things that you've seen change in that whole world of regulation and enforcement over the last say five years yeah so you have to kind of look and like break it down into who who does what so in the us right there's 50 states 45 of sales tax regimes everybody taxes differently you have about 20 that tax has and about 35 that tax your downloadable software why that is is because historically services have gone are not taxed as software as a service kind of you know they update their laws more and more states start to tax that at one time it was 15 right now there's 20. eventually we will see probably all states taxing it um but they just have to kind of catch up with the law and make updates you have states like california who is super i'll call like they're super chill because all the tech companies are based here they don't charge sales tax in in in the software world you have to have a physical component to your product to get sales tax charged because all the you know all the companies are here they also are notorious for they are really great at automating so they will send out notices but they're they're all automated so it's kind of either like you there's some little fix you have to do they don't send scary ones the flip side of that you have places like texas who they're one of the um states that don't have an income tax so their source of revenue is sales tax so they're going to be a lot more aggressive they send out scary notices like you're pre have you done your prepayments correctly like if you are off by a dollar you know interest and penalty is are charged compounded daily blah blah blah um so their texas is like on the other end of the spectrum texas washington tend to be um pretty intense just because they don't have an income tax that's what they go after in terms of like um movement in what's taxable texas is now basically financial services never you don't have to charge sales tax from financial services they are starting to now say um credit card processing is actually data processing not financial services data processing is taxable so you know you you each step kind of pushes something a little bit further to eventually everybody's gonna ultimately probably be collecting tax on most things so to bring it back up so this is just a hint of what i know you're dealing with all the time right like all these things are changing constantly um what does that mean for the sas business owner what does that mean for me as somebody who's trying to just run a business yeah and i think it's like i don't think of us as kind of you know we want you we're going to be the best provider for you for the whole term of your business like no we're going to be really good for when you're small and you need to focus on your business until you have enough resources to kind of bring this in-house you you need somebody with expertise that is looking out and monitoring it so that you're free to do other things i kind of our like niche is almost you know taking you from like a middle schooler throughout college then you're an adult and you you now bring it all in house and ultimately my hope is you bring it in-house and you're like whoa this is super complex like i'm so glad we had a provider do this um because one it is constantly changing but there are things that take a while so all this um all the e kind of invoicing mandates it's it takes years to get a whole like globe compliant um and they focus on different industries they roll it out here um the first they roll it out um domestically to you know all the domestic corporations then they roll it out to the eu um so it's not kind of um it takes time and you just have to know where to position yourself in that lineup to make sure you're not that unlucky one that gets the short straw what so so so if i'm assessments so so can i do this myself do i need to outsource it like what what are the different ways i can so so i understand now that like if i'm based in the us i might have to i might have to collect and remit that tax to european tax authorities right if i'm if i'm in germany i might have to collect and remit taxes to u.s taxing authorities all over the us right because i've got customers there that that feels a little daunting to me so um how could i like how what what are the different ways that sas businesses do this like how do they even manage this particular process um the two ways to kind of go about doing this one is to know your business footprint know know kind of where you have sales who you're selling to what you're selling know all of those trends second one is like what's your risk appetite you know i i know companies who have said taxes will come later and they go full speed ahead in something else that's their choice when you so so let me stop you there they say taxes will come later what do you mean what are they saying well they're basically saying that in the in the near term like this year they don't have the resources to do taxes they'll pick it up next year interesting so they're saying that maybe i should be collecting taxes but i'm not going to like i'm just going to ignore it oh yeah i mean it's a resource issue like um so then they come back you know we've highlighted where they have issues then this client i think went into vda which is voluntary disclosure where you come forth and you say hey i realize i haven't been compliant i will file six years back of taxes up front but you're gonna waive kind of all the interests and penalties for me um that's the process that you proactively enter in with the states um but most most states like so if you're let's let's bring it down let's start with the u.s business like selling abroad you're expanding um in the u.s it's going to be the same for anybody and each state has a different threshold the thresholds run from a hundred thousand to five hundred thousand and that means the amount of revenue that i've collected from a particular state like i've got customers i've made a hundred thousand dollars of sales in a in a state or whatever the threshold is yeah now that all of a sudden you have economic nexus economic nexus came from it was a super important court case 2018 wayfarer versus irs or south dakota south dakota they basically said no longer do you need to have a physical presence in a state to collect sales tax which was a game changer right because before if i was selling into a state i had to have either an office or an employee there to collect sales tax they said no longer you now have nexus just by pure sales so the thresholds range hundred thousand five hundred thousand mostly taxable sales um and you look at your 12-month sales to see where you have the biggest um if you kind of i use a hundred thousand dollars as a threshold if you're nowhere near that you're totally fine if you know you have 500 000 a million in multiple states you do want to stop and take a closer look that's if you're in u.s or abroad but you're selling into the us right that's that's you you're we're really looking at where your sales are being done what what happens if i did 500 grand in a state that has a tax in texas for example um but i don't collect and remit those taxes what happens like what's the risk yeah so and this is this is kind of the game i play all day because i don't if i had a magic crystal ball and look at it be like you're gonna get caught you're gonna get caught it kind of it depends on your risk level like if you're a company that is looking to get acquired or have a majority investment go public that stuff will get picked up 100 on a diligence so you want to clean it up now if you're a company that like you're willing to take on a little more risk to put resources in other parts of the business that's up to you what you you got to look at the risk level though and there are ways to really kind of i'll say keep that risk as small as possible and that's that's kind of what i do every day you need to look at things like yeah enforcement taxability of the products ease of use like some states require you or some countries require you to have a local representative there that you have to pay every year um so your cost just went up tenfold there's a lot of elements to look at more than just oh hey we crossed the sales threshold is it um what happens is is texas going to come after me are they going to find out that i didn't collect sales tax they could find me they could and i will be transparent we are under audit with texas actually right now um they have come uh knocking on our door and asking for all of our information um they are notoriously good watch out for texas like texas um washington the states without sales tax or without income taxes where um so they we have have been collecting texas sales tax so because we're a little bit bigger than you know kind of our target market they're actually looking at very detailed rates what tax rates are we charging um did we get the right classifications it's a little more nuanced but yes they very much could come after you for that and they'll do that no matter where you are in the world yeah uh there one other incentive that is to filing is i don't know if you've heard the statute of limitations um this is kind of like you governments will have a period of time irs uses three years most states are four um based when you filed to come audit it so right now they're in what 2018 so something you filed in 2018 is still kind of an open statue and the government can still reach out and say hey we're auditing this once the period closes they can no longer look back if you've never filed the period the statute never starts meaning they have unlimited look back so they could go back you know till the beginning of time interesting i only get that statute if i filed yeah so you walk the line between sometimes you know filing is in your benefit because you start the statute now you don't want to file wrong because then you can look at negligence penalties but there are cases where you just want to get it the statute started um to know that those years are kind of closed interesting so what what about what about internationally so that's that's the u.s so 100k to 500k that changed in 2018 what about outside the us yeah so outside the u.s the rules actually they're changed very recently there is no longer in eu specifically there is no thresholds for selling into the eu if you live in the eu there's a i think it's the 10 000 euro threshold combined but if you are us uk selling into the eu you have no there's no sales thresholds every taxable dollar is technically you know subject to that um taxable meaning your b2b sales or sorry backwards your b to c sales because b2b sales are gonna um you are able to leverage the reverse charge zero percent rate in all eu countries now as you start to expand outside of the eu you will start to see thresholds and you look at your taxable sales but some countries tax book b to b and b to c um examples of like i wrote down a bunch of countries so just in 2020 these malaysia singapore mexico chile indonesia they all passed rules centered on the taxation of digital goods and services by non-residents meaning you don't live in that country so we actually registered and started collecting in all of those um countries in line with the new guidance rollout um there's anywhere from like six to ten a year that you want to be like i have i'm constantly monitoring and looking at those factors like do we qualify like what's their process like india rolled out this new tax and like but they didn't think about how are we going to pay so it's been i mean we're still trying to figure out how to remit some taxes um in india because they didn't think through that process like all of these things you know cost your company time and money so you want to consider them on the back end there are we've seen countries that yeah they don't really have any rules on enforcement so not a lot of people have complied if you have really gray rules on what's considered taxable or not it's like i don't sometimes it's not worth doing that dance unless you kind of have all these things set in stone interesting so if i'm if i'm located in say i'm located in the u.s um and i'm selling into europe you you and i were talking about this once so explain to me to this kid to make sure i understand within the eu it's not it's not like one uniform vat rate right it's a it's like they're they're all different right like walk me through that again because i thought that was fascinating yeah so the the eu is cool like now it's post brexit so it doesn't include uk um but they have a one consolidated filing which is awesome but then each country has their own tax rate and they range you know most of them are right around 20 but you can get up to 25 another the netherlands maybe um germany is 19. they all kind of range right around there so it's one submission that you file but each sale is taxed based on the rate of the country where the buyer is located so if i'm in the u.s and somebody from germany you know signs up for my sas business then on that sale i'm required to charge the germany vat rate and then remit that to them and file in in the and then same within the netherlands same with france anywhere in that zone like that's so so what what am i supposed to do like export an excel sheet and then like run like percentages and do like a vlookup like how am i supposed to do this yeah i mean so in the eu has made it quite easy kind of like you can sign up and register with like one country most we we use ireland most people if you're an english-speaking country it's super easy ireland we sign up register and that's where we file quarterly um but you do have to yeah like a vlookup or build it into your engine whatever this is this is if i'm doing it myself right if i'm trying to do it myself something like that i can hire another way to do it would be like to hire an accountant to do this but that person's just going to be doing the same thing right just a manual like like somehow build like some sort of complex sheet that's gonna be changing all the time because these rates change all the time right yeah they're they don't they don't change a ton um what tends to change more is new right now or in the process of new countries are getting up to speed and passing new laws so more so you see a country not taxing now taxing versus like huge rate changes there will be you know let's say under 10 countries that do a one or two percentage change every year um adjust for inflation all that kind of stuff but you usually see new countries coming online what um so you can do those two things i could do it myself i could hire i could hire somebody to like try and calculate it all for me like a local accountant or somebody i can ignore it right and just hope nobody comes after me that one seems to be a fairly popular option actually in the market um how many so you you occasio i know you occasionally get called in to like talk to companies about that situation like what what are those conversations like what do people normally say i mean it's kind of like monkey see monkey do they look around they say hey all my none of my friends are charging like it doesn't seem like we need to be so in that case it's almost like it's a little bit harder to convince somebody to do something that like you can't produce a tangible result for them right there i can never promise that you will or won't get audited what i can promise is that there are things if you do some small actions now it will set you up just so much better in the future rather than sitting and doing nothing and it's really looking at knowing the business knowing your footprint and what risk you you kind of want to take on um like you have to look you have the resourcing to be able to build this internally and update rates and whatnot um or is it just you want to completely outsource it so so so another option obviously is a merchant record where you have somebody else on your behalf so that you don't have to worry about any of this and you can just focus on your product that's what we do just to say it um but but talk me through that so let me give you a couple of scenarios and you you tell me sort of what you how how i can set myself up for success depending on my like my goals so say i'm a say i'm a sas company i could be based anywhere but i want to get to an exit right so i want to get to into an acquisition potentially even an ipo like that that might even be an option for me like what happens if i've been ignoring taxes all this time is that going to come back to bite me if those are the two things that i'm really working toward yeah so i i did i did two years on an m a tax team and i kid you not nine times out of ten it was a sales tax issue um because we worked on small software companies um and routinely like it could break the deal but i mean we were seeing million dollar purchase price adjustments just to accrue for the liability and kind of the non-compliance aspect of it so 100 if you're looking for some type of exit or change and you haven't sat back and looked at your products do that or hire somebody to do that just so you can get a sense of like where am i in this whole lineup like am i really under all the thresholds and i don't sell like taxable products or like am i growing very rapidly and this is going to be an issue for me in the new near future yeah interesting a million dollars it cost me a million dollars if i don't do this right like multiple million because you got to get millions if you're not doing it um in one say you know you're not doing it anywhere so um it can add up let's say and they'll slap on 40 interest and penalties um it also takes a little some states take a lot of time to register um with kovid are we even in covet i don't really know but for some reason that's been the excuse for you know i've had registrations that take over a year so just to even start that process you know where's your business going to be in a year where's your footprint and what what has changed in a year the easiest way to do it you give it to a tax professional well if your business isn't in the stage to kind of insource that and bring it in house and have the knowledge readily available and you don't want to pay the fees of going to an advisor which can i mean i we use advisors all the time it's it's quite costly the solution is to use a company like fastspring and mor where we gather the information from you and deploy um kind of the tax compliant transactions on your behalf yeah and then like then it's you who deals with all those emails in the background you and your team um let me give you let me give two more real quick so let's say let's say i'm more of like a lifestyle entrepreneur and i've got a sas business and i and i and it's growing right but like like hyper growth is not my goal exit is not my goal like i just wanted to like make good money pay my employees like have a have a consistent stream of that gives me the lifestyle that i want to live um what is what what are the things if i if i'm ignoring taxes like am i going to get sucked into like a whole bunch of like time-consuming audits that i don't want to have to deal with is that the risk for me yeah the the issue with like doing something wrong is just the amount sheer amount of time it takes to clean it up if you have a little mess it you know you can clean it up in a few months if you have a big nasty mess it can take years so do yourself a favor and kind of look at your business operations and what you sell and within the next three to five years where where could you be where's your growth apply a thousand dollar threshold to the state level and then really look at your sales internationally and come up with a number and then basically use that number like am i willing to live with this know that it's gonna you know double every year but if you're willing to kind of sit with that then it's up to you what you want to do this is the potential tax liability that i might be on the hook for is what you're talking about okay that's so so if i'm that person and i have been that person in the past like the last thing i want is tax headaches right like that's like i don't want that kind of stress in my life um okay let me give you one more and and we'll end on this one and then we'll wrap it up which is i think what if i'm a company and i'm based in india for example and i'm trying to break into the european market or i'm trying to break into the u.s market i can see i know maybe i have it maybe i have like a product that i know has traction in in the sort of geographic location where i am say it's southeast asia um and i know there are a bunch of people in germany or in in spain or something like that that that that would love my product and i'm in the process of trying to get marketing strategies and partners in these different locations and i want to break into new markets what's what do i need to like watch out for when it comes to taxes in that situation uh i mean that way i mean there's really no threshold selling into the eu so mo and almost everything is going to be taxable there theirs is really based on who you're selling to your b2b or your b2c um if you're purely b2c i would say that it's something that you need to have on your checklist before you launch if you're b2b then if you're only you know selling to businesses who are bat registered and they're going to do it on their own you have a little bit more leniency that case is only going to apply in europe um the way the u.s does it it's it's not they have a different strategy where it's taxable to your end user um both b to b and b to c so that's why you see their thresholds are a little bit higher you somebody's only exempt if they have an exempt status such as a non-profit a government agency or reseller you tend to get a lot less exempt buyers in the u.s so your liability racks up more quickly which there are a little bit higher thresholds there which is great interesting so if i'm if i'm looking to break into the u.s i might be looking at at an even more like even higher tax liability on a b2b situation so it sounds like that i just need to keep it it's like i i need to think about marketing anything about partnerships i need to think about how to break in but i also need to think about like how to how to do the the financial piece of it in a way that's not going to come back that caused me a bunch of problems in three years yeah and just in my experience being at fast spring is that the customers will tell you like i mean if you're just blatantly like not charging you do get a few that say that but more often than not they're not going to tell you because it's less money for them when if you're doing it incorrectly though or they think like you should be collecting there we i see like emails sometimes that are like hey did you see these new rules that passed like why are you not collecting this and i give them you know a 14 paragraph response of like my analysis they're like oh whoa cool i'm glad you have it on glad you have it handled right which is which is which is quite literally what we do on behalf of sellers who use our who use our products so that's a great use case for that i think let's let me let me let's see if we can wrap it up like what from this conversation what are like one or two things that you really want people to know about about taxes when it comes to selling sas um just that and it's not as scary like as it sounds there are a lot of rules and a lot of countries and a lot of rates but it really just takes either doing it yourself if you're interested in that or partnering with somebody like fast spring to to make your life so much easier right now because tax is one of those things that only in hindsight will you be like ah crap because once you know it's done or once the year is closed there's nothing that you can do um to change anything you can only change going forward you can't go back and recollect on those transactions that happened last year are you i mean technically you could but you'd probably spend more time figuring that out um than just actually paying yeah okay cool thank you rachel this has been very informative um we might have you back on if we get a bunch of questions from people so maybe we'll talk to you again thanks awesome bye [Music]