Automatic Invoicing for Easy Digital Downloads

WordPress isn’t a CMS. In many ways, it’s the CMS. Of the top 10,000 sites using a CMS, 48% are using WordPress – its nearest competitor is Drupal with 14.8% market share. Big names that rely on it include The New Yorker, TechCrunch and Variety.

One of the things that makes WordPress so well-liked is its ubiquity – users know what to expect. Another is the wide range of plug-ins that enhance WP’s functionality. That brings us to EDD – Easy Digital Downloads, a popular and highly effective plugin that lets WordPress users sell digital downloads right from their WordPress site.

Trouble is, with the latest changes to EU VAT rules, selling digital downloads just got a lot more fraught. Before, you only had to charge VAT to your customers based on your home country. Wherever your buyer was from, the VAT was the rate in your country, and since you only needed to know where you lived, you didn’t need to keep data on your customers – or even see it.

All that has changed.

Instead of your home country, you have to comply with the VAT rate in your customer’s home country. Instead of charging one rate of VAT, small businesses now have to charge 75 different rates of VAT from 28 countries, and to do this you have to know where your customers are located, and to hold that data for ten years.

So where WordPress and EDD could solve all your problems back in 2014, before the new rules came in, now you need something more.

That doesn’t mean you need to stop using WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads, though. If you’re one of the 40k+ businesses and individuals who have downloaded EDD, you likely don’t want to give it up. What you need is a tool that adds on the functionality you need to stay VAT compliant while retaining everything EDD already gives you.

EDD Quaderno has exactly that tool. It’s a plugin that works seamlessly with EDD, allowing a site manager to automatically calculate the EU VAT, on the EDD checkout page. Every time a payment is marked as complete, Quaderno sends the customer a (great-looking) receipt and tracks the location evidences, to make sure you’re fully VAT compliant. You don’t have to ask your customers where they’re from, check up on their locations or input data into spreadsheets or databases. Quaderno does all that for you.

All you need to get the plugin up and running is Easy Digital Downloads, a Quaderno account, and about 5 minutes.

After you download the EDD Quaderno plugin, unpack it to your wp-content/plugins/ folder. Upload it to your site, then navigate to wp-admin/plugins.php and activate it. All you have to do than is configure it, which you can do straight from Downloads > Settings > Quaderno.

If you find it easier you can install the plugin directly through WordPress – search for it in Plugins > Add New and install directly there.

With Quaderno EDD plugin, you never need to worry about being EU VAT compliant again!