I use other SaaS that use Paddle as a payment tool and unfortunately they are unable to provide us with invoices properly with a clean automatic send. They only send receipts, which is not valid for our businesses.
It’s terrible: every month I have to write to Paddle support to ask them to send me an invoice for my Baserow payment, and every other month they fail to do so.
Would it be possible for you to consider another supplier? Today, Senja, another SaaS that I really like, has abandoned Paddle for Stripe :
Hey @bastien, I agree that it’s unfortunate that they don’t provide a nice PDF invoice, I find that a bit odd myself as well. But if I look at the test purchases we make in our sandbox environment, then they call it a receipt in the email. If I open the “View receipt” (Your Paddle.com Order #513598-11487631) link. Even though it’s called a receipt, it does contain all the information a normal invoice would hold, like VAT, address data.
What is specifically missing on the receipt that makes it invalid for your business?
We can’t easily switch to another payment provider. This would be a huge development effort, and Paddle is a merchant on record, which helps us to sell in many countries. If we switch to Stripe, we would need to manually file tax forms in every country, state, etc. It’s a lot of work.
Thank you for your time @bram. I understand. In France, however, a document that says “Receipt” cannot legally be considered as an invoice. If it’s a receipt, it’s not an invoice. If it is an invoice, it has to be written : “Invoice”. That is a legal question.
I understand that the change may be burdensome for Baserow. Perhaps we should put pressure on Paddle to send legal invoices in this case. I already tried, they don’t care. Senja decided to leave Paddle. Maybe Baserow team could insist on that problem with Paddle team.
I’ve asked Paddle if it’s possible to call it an invoice instead of receipt, but technically receipt is not an incorrect name because it’s a confirmation of a transaction that has already happened, where an invoice must be paid in the future.
Any update on that point ? It’s always torture when I receive my Paddle ‘receipt’ every month. I know I’m going to have to exchange 15 emails with support to get an invoice. Unfortunately, I think I’m going to come back to this thread every time I receive this “receipt”. I have to admit that it’s something I find hard to accept. I’ve seen other SaaS companies leave Paddle for this reason (Plausible, Senja, etc.).
Hey @bastien, I spoke to Paddle, but it seems that they can only call it an invoice with their newer platform, Paddle Billing. We’re still on the older platform, but we’re not yet sure what the scope of migrating to Paddle Billing will be. This is something that we also want because it comes with additional features we would like to use.
This issue, which had been resolved, has suddenly resurfaced. Today I received a document that is once again a receipt rather than an invoice. I was also charged VAT, which had never happened before. It’s hard to understand and a very unpleasant user experience. And of course, nothing has changed on Paddle’s end: a confusing interface, non-existent support—it’s truly disastrous… Not up to the standard of a product of Baserow’s quality. Paddle is designed to sell small desktop applications, not large-scale SaaS solutions. Please switch payment providers!
Hey @bastien, I’m sorry to hear that you’re running into problems with Paddle again. I’ve asked their support team to look into it.
That said, Paddle is actually designed for large-scale SaaS solutions. Paddle has a lot of big SaaS customers. There are only two companies that I know of that can act as a Merchant of Record. This allows us to be able to process payments globally without us having to worry about VAT, sales tax, etc. Those two companies are Paddle and Lemon Squeezy.
In that case @bram, you should switch to Lemon Squeezy. The user experience is 100 times better. Paddle is an absolute nightmare. It’s like something from the 2010s that hasn’t evolved, with an interface and support worthy of Kafka’s worst books. I’d pay you more for that. To receive invoices worthy of the name.
That aside, I have a real problem to resolve since, once again, I’m receiving receipts instead of invoices, and on top of that, VAT was added overnight without warning and for no reason.
Please get back to me to explain what’s going on. Their support team isn’t capable of doing so.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you love Baserow, and you have a lot on your plate, it’s really incredibly frustrating to have to fight to get a correct invoice. It’s the only example I know of among the many SaaS tools I use. This is really an issue that needs to be addressed for the basic convenience of your users.
Ok thank you. Hopefully this would solve the problem.