german customer wants a vat invoice with my vat number and i'm a one-person us llc - what do i actually send

Whatever you decide, turn on tax ID collection at checkout now. Both the main billing tools let you ask for a VAT number on the payment page and validate it, which means the invoice comes out correct automatically and you stop getting these emails a month after the sale.

Retrofitting the number onto an invoice that has already been paid is the annoying version of this problem. Collecting it before the charge is a checkbox.

Not tax advice, and rules change, but the shape of it for digital services is worth understanding because it is not complicated once you see the split.

Selling to an EU business that has a valid VAT number: the reverse charge mechanism applies. You do not charge VAT. The buyer accounts for it in their own return. Your invoice should show their VAT number and carry a line stating that the reverse charge applies. This is what your German customer is actually asking for - they want their number on the document so their accountant can file it. You do not need a German VAT number to do this.

Selling to EU consumers: different world. VAT is due at the customer's rate from the first sale, and for a business established outside the EU there is no small-seller threshold to hide under. The simplification is the non-Union One Stop Shop, where you register in one member state and file everything through it.

Validate the number before you rely on it. The EU runs a public VIES checker, and if the number does not validate you treat the sale as B2C.

The lazy structural answer is to stop being the seller. A merchant of record sells to the customer, handles VAT and sales tax registration, issues the compliant invoice with the right numbers on it, and pays you out. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy are the usual two for small software, and the headline rate is meaningfully higher than a bare card processor - roughly in the five percent plus a fixed fee range, but verify current pricing because both have changed it, and one of them has been through an acquisition since.

So the real trade is a few extra points of revenue against never having to think about this again. At $290 a year with a handful of EU customers the extra fee is small money and the mental overhead saving is not.

At higher volume it flips and people move back to processing themselves plus a tax automation add-on.

One hour with an accountant who specialises in cross-border digital services, not a general one, is genuinely worth it and costs nowhere near $800 if you come with a written list of specific questions. Mine was 45 minutes and mostly consisted of them telling me which three things did not apply to me at my size.

You are American, they cannot make you register for anything, just send a normal invoice and move on. Nobody with 40 customers is on a European tax authority's radar.