There is a large category of invoicing tool that works anywhere in the world, which is another way of saying it was built for nowhere in particular. They generally produce an attractive document quickly, and then hand you the local details to sort out yourself.
For a lot of people that is fine. For anyone registered for tax, it becomes a small monthly charge on your time. Here is what to look at.
A tax field is not tax support
Almost every invoicing tool has a box where you type a percentage. That is not the same as supporting your tax system, and the difference shows up in six places.
Naming
The tax has a name where you are — VAT in the UK and much of Europe, GST in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India and Singapore, sales tax across the United States. Your customers expect to see that word. A line that says "Tax 20%" on a British invoice looks like something generated overseas, because it was.
Inclusive versus exclusive pricing
Whether you quote tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive prices is a local convention as much as a preference — consumer-facing prices in the UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand normally include tax, while US prices normally exclude it, and business-to-business invoicing often differs from both. Tools built around one model make the other awkward, and the workaround is usually you doing arithmetic the software should be doing.
Registration status
Being registered for a tax is a state you move into, and occasionally out of. Software should let you turn it on and off, label the document accordingly, and leave already-issued invoices exactly as they were. Plenty of tools treat it as a permanent setting and quietly rewrite history when you change it.
Business identifiers
Most countries want some identifier on the invoice — a VAT number, a GST number, an ABN, a company number, an EIN. They have different names and different formats. A single generic "tax ID" field that prints an unlabelled number is not much help to whoever reads the invoice.
More than one tax at a time
In Canada a sale can carry GST and PST. In India, CGST and SGST. Across much of the United States, state and county tax are shown separately. In each case the buyer is entitled to see the split, and a tool with one tax field cannot represent it. One combined percentage is usually not acceptable to the person paying.
Reporting
At some point you have to tell a revenue authority what you collected. Software that stores tax as a number on a document but cannot total it across a period leaves you doing that in a spreadsheet, which is where the mistakes come from.
Currency is the other half
Currency support usually means "you can pick a symbol". The questions worth asking are more specific.
- Does it default to my currency without configuration?
- Can I raise one invoice in a different currency without a second account?
- Does the currency stay attached to the invoice, so a report a year later still adds up?
- Are my subscription and my invoices allowed to be in different currencies?
The third matters more than it seems. If currency is an account setting rather than a property of each invoice, changing it later reinterprets everything you have already issued.
How to test this in five minutes
Before you commit to any invoicing tool, run this:
- Set up your business with your real tax registration status
- Create an invoice and check the tax line is named correctly for your country
- Switch between tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive pricing
- Turn your tax registration off and confirm the old invoice did not change
- Create one invoice in a foreign currency
- Run whatever tax report it offers for the current period
Anything that fails one of those will keep failing it every month you use the product.
Where MyBillDash sits
MyBillDash names the tax for your country, lets you choose inclusive or exclusive pricing, uses your registration status to decide whether the document is labelled a tax invoice, changes the business number label to match your country, and allows several taxes on one invoice where your jurisdiction requires the split.
Every document snapshots its own tax and currency, so nothing you issued last year changes when you change a setting this year. The tax report totals whatever taxes you actually used, whatever they happen to be called.
You can start free and run the five minute test on it. That is a reasonable way to choose any of these tools.