Setting Up Sales Tax and VAT
A step-by-step walkthrough for switching on tax collection when you take payments through Benecaster’s built-in membership system.
For the background — who is responsible for what, how filing works, and what changed when you left Patreon — see Tax and VAT on Podcast Subscriptions.
This is not tax advice. It describes how to operate the software. Whether you need to collect tax, and where, is a question for an accountant.
Before You Start
You need two things:
- Your own Stripe account, connected to Benecaster. Tax runs on your Stripe account, not Benecaster’s.
- At least one tax registration. Stripe only collects tax where you have told it you are registered. Without a registration, everything below will work perfectly and collect nothing.
Start with where your business is based. That is usually the first place you are obliged to register, and it is the simplest one to get right.
Step 1 — Turn on Stripe Tax
In your Stripe Dashboard, go to Settings → Tax and click Get started.
You will be asked to confirm three things:
Your head office address. Stripe pre-fills this from your business address. Check it — it determines your home jurisdiction.
A preset product category. This is the fallback used for anything you have not categorised. You will set proper categories per product in Step 3, so this is a safety net rather than the real answer.
Whether prices include tax. Three options:
| Option | What happens |
|---|---|
| Automatic | Tax added on top for USD and CAD, included in the price everywhere else |
| Exclusive | Tax always added on top of your listed price |
| Inclusive | Your listed price is the final price; tax comes out of it |
Stripe recommends Automatic, and it matches what buyers in each market already expect. If you choose Exclusive, remember that an EU subscriber will see a higher number at checkout than the price on your tier card.
You can change this later in Stripe. It applies to everything you sell through that Stripe account.
Step 2 — Add Your Tax Registrations
Go to Tax → Locations in your Stripe Dashboard and add a registration for each place you are registered to collect.
This is the step that actually makes tax happen. Everything else is configuration; a registration is what tells Stripe to start charging.
You can also schedule a registration to begin on a future date, which is useful when you have applied to a state and know your start date.
If you have not registered anywhere yet
Registering is something you do with the tax authority, not inside Stripe — Stripe records the registration, it does not create it. Stripe can handle the registration process for you in the US, and through a partner elsewhere, if you would rather not deal with it directly.
Watching for when you need to register elsewhere
Once Stripe Tax is running, Stripe monitors your sales against each jurisdiction’s registration threshold and tells you when you are approaching or have passed one. This is the most useful thing it does, because crossing a threshold without noticing is the usual way small sellers end up owing back taxes.
Turn Stripe Tax on as soon as you are registered anywhere — even one place. The monitoring only runs while Stripe Tax is enabled, so leaving it off until you “need” it means you have no warning system during exactly the period you are most likely to drift over a line without realising. And it costs very little to leave on: the per-transaction fee applies only to transactions in places where you are registered, so with a single registration you are paying on that one jurisdiction’s sales and getting monitoring across all of them.
Monitoring only sees sales that go through this Stripe account. If you invoice anyone outside Stripe — consulting, sponsorships, live events, anything billed by hand — those sales can still count toward a threshold, and Stripe will not know about them. Stripe lets you import outside transactions by CSV so the monitoring reflects your whole business rather than part of it.
Step 3 — Set a Tax Category on Each Product
Once tax is on, every tier and buy-up needs a tax category before it can be sold. Benecaster prompts you for anything that still needs one.
You answer two questions — what kind of content is it, and is it a subscription or bought once:
| What you’re selling | Category |
|---|---|
| Your podcast, a bonus feed | Audio |
| A video podcast, bonus video | Video |
| Transcripts, show notes, a newsletter | Written material |
| Structured lessons | Course |
| A book read aloud, sold outright | Audiobook |
| Anything else | General digital services |
Benecaster does not pick for you, because the category changes what your subscribers are charged and the responsibility for getting it right is yours.
One thing we can settle: subscribers keep the files. A private podcast feed downloads into their podcast app and the episodes stay there after a subscription ends. Some categories distinguish content people keep from content they only stream, so that matters when you choose.
Take care with the audiobook category. It can reduce the tax charged, because books are taxed at lower rates in some countries — but it means specifically a book read aloud and sold outright. Packaging a run of episodes and calling it an audiobook does not automatically make it one. Because it lowers the tax charged, getting it wrong means under-collecting, and under-collected tax is a bill you settle later yourself. This is the one category worth checking with an accountant before you use it.
Step 4 — Switch It On in Benecaster
Go to Benecaster → Settings → Membership → Payments and turn on Calculate tax automatically.
Both switches are required. Stripe Tax has to be on in your Stripe account and here. With only the Stripe half done, nothing looks broken and no error appears — tax simply is not calculated.
Step 5 — Check It Works
Take a test subscription through your own checkout, using a billing address in a place you are registered.
Confirm three things:
- Tax appears at checkout, as its own line or folded into the total depending on your setting from Step 1
- The Stripe invoice shows the tax and the address
- The amount charged is what you expected
If tax is zero when you expected some, the usual cause is a missing registration for that address. Stripe does not treat this as an error — no registration simply means no tax.
Existing Subscribers
Turning tax on does not apply it to subscriptions that already exist. Anyone who subscribed before you enabled tax keeps renewing at their original amount, untaxed, until their subscription is updated.
Stripe has a documented process for updating existing subscriptions to start calculating tax. Decide deliberately whether to run it — applying tax to existing subscribers changes what they pay, and depending on your setting from Step 1 it either increases their bill or reduces what you receive. Either way it is worth telling them before it happens rather than after.
Filing Is Still Yours
Stripe calculates and collects. You are still responsible for registering, filing returns, and remitting the money — the tax you collect is held on behalf of a tax authority, not earned.
Stripe can file for you in over 90 countries and every US state as a paid service, but even then the legal responsibility remains yours; Stripe is doing the paperwork, not taking on the obligation.
When it is time to file, your numbers are in Tax → Locations in the Stripe Dashboard — itemised and summarised exports, and location reports already formatted to each jurisdiction’s filing periods. You can invite your accountant to your Stripe account as a view-only team member rather than emailing spreadsheets around.
See Tax and VAT on Podcast Subscriptions for more on what Stripe does and does not take off your hands.