Garani

What can I say, then my accountant, who works with a number of companies that sell in Europe, is wrong and you are right. I am not going to swear about the authenticity of a fax or some letterhead.

So what? My VAT number is right at the frontpage page of my business. Rob has got his on his front page too. In other countries in EU there are laws where you must show your VAT number for all to see. HMCR does not want you to know the name of the business that the VAT number belongs to. So I must accept that HMCR is fine with just a ACK/NACK. I used an Official Tool, where the data is piped in by the Inland Revenue offices of all the EC Member States. I cannot use a fax to check, because it is easily forged. I cannot use a letterhead because I have no way to make sure if that paper is valid or not, and there is no law imposing on company stamps. Finally the member state does not want me to know the name of the company that is using that VAT number, shall I just do business within the UK and forget about the rest of Europe? Another thing is making sure that you have process in place to regularly audit your accounts, and checking that VAT numbers are valid. I strongly suggest that everyone must do internal audits, and you don't need expensive consultants to do that. But making this VAT check for 100% of your customers it means that your products have a strong possibility of being used for VAT carouselle fraud. But I am not selling watches, nor mobiles or chips.

And that's the current extent of the law. Rob, you are talking about a "fax". How easily can you forge a fax? Shall we ask for stuff printed on letterhead? Fine, let's go back to the 19th century and do it: £0+shipping will get you letterheads from a known printing site. This is ridicululus! Stop being paranoid and use the tools that you have been provided with. The European Commission and the Member States provided you with a tool to check if a VAT number is either valid or not. If the member state decided that you should not know the details, you are stuck. By the way, go and check you VAT number and you'll notice that HMCR will not provide you with your business details! This is what mine says: Yes, valid VAT number VAT number GB 912993307 Member State GB Name --- Address --- Date when request received 24/09/2008 (dd/mm/yyyy) Oh, wait, VAT is a french invention dated back to the 1950s... Heck, in the 19th century things were actually easier!

Ah! That's a pain... Here I get a customer, who happily puts his VAT number, expecting not to pay VAT and I charge for it. I get a angry email (or maybe I just loose the new customer) at that point I have to mark him as tax exempt, refund the customer, void the old invoice and make a new one... and let's not get into already provisioned services... Nope, it doesn't work, and there are ways to check live via the net: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/faqvies.do#item16 So, yes, this check can be done automatically, and yes it should be done nowadays with sales done at all time, night and day.

I appreciate it! At the moment I really need something basic: customer buys a 5 license pack of my software. I get an email and I do the provisioning manually. This is what I am doing with MB5.3 at the moment. Well, let me tell you what I am doing. I have written a CP Module where I retrieve a bunch of custom add-on from the user's order and then I provision for the account. This is pretty much like a "hosting cp" would work, but the add-ons are all different and in MB5 I have pretty much freedom to configure that. That's fine. I am not looking for a timesheet product. Just as long as I can send a batch to the system telling it to raise an invoice with a number of line items that would be fine. Well, I'll be more then happy to do it like it (should) work with MB5: have user groups and each group has an assigned discount to a price. Being a UK company, VAT was pretty much a given. The multicurrency is not something that I must have now, but should be in the pipeline for development. [qoute] - Support for API so that we can interact with the billing system from our control panel[**] http://wiki.whmcs.com/API:About Had a look at it, but it is missing a couple of features that I do need: 1) Ability to pull Packages data 2) Ability to pull due Invoices 3) Ability to raise a session ID when the user logs in our control panel, so that when the user goes to the billing system, he will not have to re-authenticate. Mmmm so I would have to raise invoices, maybe via a batch system that I write. Well, to be fair about 2 months ago I did get the 14 days trial, but when moving from somewhere else you do need a bit more then those 14 days. You have to be ready to invest R&D in the new solution BEFORE you even decide to commit to it. I am fine in spending time and money, but I just want to make sure that the humus (ie the userbase of WHMCS) is such that I can feel that this is a worthwhile endeavour.

Sorry to bother the forum, but I really need some more "community" type of answers. I know that a lot of people moved successfully from MB5 to WHMCS, but I still have doubts. We are customers of Modernbill 5.3 and have gotten to a point where we are seriously thinking of moving away from them. This is what we need the system to do: - Support for selling software licenses - Support for selling hosting like accounts[*] - Support for invoicing Professional Service hourly work - Support for multi level discounts to our resellers - Support for migration from MB5.3 to your software - Support for VAT and multicurrency - Support for API so that we can interact with the billing system from our control panel[**] - Support for writing our own control panel module - Support for "by usage" billing [*] We sell online backup solutions and we have written our own module that takes care of calling our control panel and provision for it. [**] Our clients' credentials are checked and logged in Modernbill so that we can seemlesly provide a one-time login experience, plus we pull package configurations from modernbill's user account. Also we need to know if you provide professional service for writing custom control panel modules Thanks to all