SaaS ERP Consultant, UK

VAT on digital services: business and consumer customers

For a UK SaaS company, the VAT question changes with every customer. A UK business customer is normally charged UK VAT. A business customer abroad is often handled under reverse charge or place of supply rules, so the invoice must show the right wording and the customer's tax number. A consumer in an EU country is a different case again: VAT on digital services to consumers is generally due where the consumer lives, which is why many sellers register for a one-stop scheme rather than in each country.

Your accountant decides which rules apply to your products and customers. My work is to make the systems carry those decisions:

• Capture whether each customer is a business or a consumer, and validate tax numbers where relevant.
• Record evidence of the customer's location, such as billing address and payment country, in a way that can be shown later.
• Map each combination to a tax code and invoice wording in the billing platform.
• Pass tax detail to the ledger so the UK return and any overseas returns can be prepared from the same data.

Under Making Tax Digital, the route from transactions to the submitted return must be digital. I check that route end to end, as described on my ERP consultant UK page.

Direct Debit, cards and failed payments

Many UK business customers would rather sign a Direct Debit mandate than enter a card, especially for annual or high-value plans. Overseas customers more often pay by card, and larger accounts may insist on invoices and bank transfer. The billing design has to cope with all three on the same subscription model.

The decisions I work through with UK teams include:

• Which plans and customer types are offered Direct Debit, card or invoice, and who can override that.
• How a mandate or card is linked to the subscription, and what happens to it on upgrade, plan change or change of company details.
• The dunning sequence for a failed collection: retries, reminder messages, grace period and when access is restricted.
• How collections and payment processor fees are matched to invoices in the ledger, so bank reconciliation is not a weekly guessing exercise.

Failed payment recovery is one of the most practical metrics a UK SaaS business can improve, and it depends almost entirely on clean data between billing, CRM and customer success. I also make sure renewal reminders and account messages respect UK GDPR and your privacy notices, because billing data is personal data for sole traders and consumers.

Revenue schedules, FRS 102 or IFRS, and investor reporting

UK SaaS companies may report under FRS 102 or under IFRS, depending on their size, group structure and investors. Your accountants decide the framework and the revenue policy. What I contribute is the system design that lets those policies run every month without a spreadsheet beside the ledger.

In practice that means contract dates and line-level schedules for subscriptions, separate handling for set-up or onboarding fees, and a full history of amendments. It also means deciding where schedules live: in the subscription billing platform, in the ERP, or in a revenue tool connected to both. Each option affects how auditors trace a number back to a signed contract.

UK investors, from angel networks to growth funds, usually ask for recurring revenue, net retention and churn in a consistent format. I write those definitions down with your finance director and build them on the same data as statutory reporting. Engineering time is a related request: if your advisors claim research and development relief, they will want development effort recorded by project, so I check that the time and cost data exists in a usable shape, leaving the claim itself to them. The SaaS process in general is set out on my ERP for SaaS page.

Choosing the stack, and when a US entity arrives

UK software businesses often start on Xero or QuickBooks with a billing platform on top, and that can work well for a long time. The change usually comes with a second entity. Many UK SaaS companies open a US subsidiary to sell into North America, and suddenly they need intercompany charges, two tax regimes, dollar and sterling ledgers and consolidated board packs.

At that point the choices are usually:

• Keep separate ledgers per entity and consolidate in a reporting tool.
• Move to an ERP that handles several entities natively, with the billing platform feeding each one.
• Use ERP subscription features for one entity and a billing platform for another, which I usually advise against because it splits the customer record.

I run the comparison as a structured ERP evaluation with scripted demonstrations based on your real customer contracts. The CRM is always in scope, because quotes and price books cause many billing errors; see my CRM consulting for that side.

All delivery is remote. UK hours overlap well with European teams and with the start of the US day, so sessions can include colleagues in both. Read more about my UK work on the UK hub, or on how billing data supports acquisition through SaaS SEO.