Financial updates in PostgreSQL Europe

As we say welcome to a new year, we have a couple of updates to the finances and payment handling in PostgreSQL Europe, that will affect our members and attendees of our events.

First of all, PostgreSQL Europe has unfortunately been forced to VAT register. This means that most of our invoices (details below) will now include VAT.

Second, we have enabled a new payment provider for those of you that can't or prefer not to use credit cards but that still allows for fast payments.

VAT

PostgreSQL Europe being VAT registered means a lot of things. First and foremost, it means a lot more administrative work for the board, and it means that we have to pay a substantial amount of money to an accountant firm to help us out with the paperwork around this. This is very unfortunate, but there is nothing we can do about it.

It also means a number of our backend systems have had to be updated with support for this. Yay for holiday projects! We deployed the code for that this morning (this is why we had the registration for FOSDEM PGDay closed for a few hours starting last night), and hopefully it will be working fine from now on. This means the invoices generated will now look slightly different, and in particular that they will include the details about the different VAT rates.

For attendees, this means a few things:

• As a private person attending our events, nothing will change. The price will be the same as before, just specified as being inclusive of VAT. The price for FOSDEM for example remains at €50, which is translated to €41.32 plus VAT. The VAT charged for a registration is that of the country where the event is held, so in this case it's the 21% VAT from Belgium.
• As a company paying for attendance to our events, the invoice will now be specifying a VAT amount. Your company may or may not be able to deduct this VAT from their own taxes. Please note that all invoices will still contain the VAT, and any deduction will be handled by your own company.
• As a company paying for sponsorship to one of our events, the same rules apply except the VAT rate will always be 20%, that of France (where PostgreSQL Europe is registered). Any VAT deduction is again up to the company.

This makes a lot of things around handling the events more complicated, but it is our goal to hide as much as possible of these complications from our attendees and sponsor. Our target is also that the changes should be cost-neutral to private persons registering for the events, but of course the actual costs of each registration is always going to depend on how much we have to pay for things like the venue and food.

New payment provider

In addition to our existing options for paying with credit card, paypal or IBAN, we have now also added direct bank payments through Trustly. Trustly has been a repeat sponsor to several of our events, so we know them well, and we are happy to add them as an option for you to choose from.

Trustly payments are made directly from your online Internet banking to our accounts. This means that unlike the IBAN transfers that we have previously supported, these payments complete almost immediately (like the credit card payments), so they can be used at any time (whereas IBAN payments are disallowed close to the event). They also provide a fully integrated payment flow which removes the risk of mistyping a payment reference.

Our Trustly payments are only supported in some countries (currently Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany (partial), Norway, Sweden) and not for all banks in these countries, but work is done to expand that coverage.

We will of course continue supporting all the previous payment methods we've had, we're just adding more choice for those of you that prefer it!

This also means that two of our three main payment providers are running on top of PostgreSQL. Sometimes dogfood tastes good :)

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