teachable:pay: Our response to US sales tax and EU VAT

The first time seeing your course earnings in your dashboard is a key milestone. For many course creators, the focus is on how to continue growing sales and delivering a course students love. As you grow, new challenges arise. You may get students from different locations, and as a business owner, you have to figure out how to track student location, charge sales tax, remit them. That’s where Teachable can step in.

Our payments solution

We know creators come to Teachable because a desire to grow an online business. What’s more, we know you want this process to be as streamlined as possible. That’s why we’ve invested the time and effort in developing our native payment gateways—teachable:pay and Monthly Payment Gateway—to answer your immediate needs when you start. We also want to continue our support along the way.

Our native payment gateways are the simplest way to accept payments online—but the benefits go beyond helping you get access to your money faster. When you use Teachable’s Monthly Payment Gateway, we also handle your US sales tax and EU VAT. With this, there’s no additional integrations or extra work. We automate the process to collect and file US sales tax and EU VAT for you. That way, you don’t have to deal with additional accounting work every quarter.

How Teachable handles US sales tax

US sales tax is always evolving and impacting anyone selling to an US audience. Adding to this complexity, each state may charge different tax rates and may charge sales tax on different products. With Teachable, when a sale is processed through our native payment gateways, we not only accept the payment, but also handle when and how much sales tax needs to be charged, collected, and remitted.

With teachable:pay and our Monthly Payment Gateway, we handle US sales tax on any of your product purchases (when applicable) directly at checkout. We also file these taxes in the required states, eliminating any time and cost you may otherwise need to dedicate to auditing your transactions.

How Teachable handles EU VAT

One common reason creators move their content online is to reach a global audience. Similar to US sales tax, when you’re using teachable:pay and our Monthly Payment Gateway, we also file EU VAT.

The European Union Value Added Tax—or EU VAT for short—is generally charged on purchases made by customers in the EU. EU VAT applies to any merchant selling a product or service (including digital products like an online course) to a customer based in Europe, regardless of whether that merchant is located in the EU.

By using Teachable’s native payment gateways, we automatically charge and collect EU VAT on all purchases made from the EU. Teachable then remits the collected taxes through the VAT OSS system every quarter to make sure each appropriate EU tax authority receives the applicable taxes. This means when the EU VAT rates are adjusted, Teachable will automatically adjust the rates, too.

Sell your products with teachable:pay

Bottom line, teachable:pay and our Monthly Payment Gateway are the best way to accept payments for your digital products. Cut third-party costs and skip the additional tech setup headaches. We accept all major payment methods, handle your team’s payouts, dispute chargebacks on your behalf, and collect and remit taxes in certain jurisdictions, including the EU and applicable US States. With teachable:pay and our Monthly Payment Gateway, you can launch your online course and expect us to support you as you grow.