Generating a compilation of one invoice per producer

Continuing the discussion from Generating invoices from OFN:

After the first pilotes in France have started, and we start to gain visibility, several hub managers and producers have already asked us this functionnality:

Today, there is one invoice generated per order, with, on this invoice, all the products.
That is a problem legally in France, as most of the CSA type hubs, and also in The Food Assembly model, are not considered as “intemediate/middlemen”, but as “business providers”. The difference is that the producer sells his products directly to the end consumer, and the pay the platform (in TFA case for example) and the hub manager for their service.
That has a legal impact, and on tax as well.
So there legally needs to be one invoice PER PRODUCER in each order.
The best way to manage that would be to give the opportunity to the hub (in the hub set-up maybe?) to tell if he wants the invoice to be a compilation of producers’invoices or an invoice in the name of the hub.
If first option chosen, the invoice generated should be a compilation of one order per producer (that’s how TFA works).

I’m not sure yet about what are the implication of this… I guess then the hub cannot have fees that are not applied on products in the shopfront (like delivery options) or then the hub would be considered as the provider of this service and will invoice himself that on a seperate invoice (included in the compilation)

Does that sound feasable? @danielle have you had similar cases in Australia, @NickWeir in UK?
Any idea about the amount of work required?
Ping @Selmo @marito59 @nickwhite

Hi there, I’m not the best person to answer this question for AU, but @sstead and @oeoeaio have a far better knowledge of the way AU hubs work (especially given Rob runs one of his own :smile:).

Hi @MyriamBoure,

Am I right in understanding that the primary reason for people wanting this functionality is for taxation purposes? It sounds quite complicated, so I am just trying to understand the benefit to the hub in operating in this way. To my knowledge there is no similar use case in Australia, in fact this situation would possibly attract more tax here, because food is not taxed whereas “services” are taxed at 10%.

I think that it should be possible to have an option on the enterprise as you suggest, which specifies that any invoices should be broken down by producer. However, I suspect that breaking down the tax charged on items at the producer level will be dependant on resolving some of that issues that came up in our Outstanding Taxation Requirements discussion. The main issue is that the way ‘forward calculated’ tax is stored at the moment prohibits us from working backwards to determine which line_items and fees the tax applied to. This is not a good situation, but it is the way Spree comes by default and we don’t really have the resources to resolve this at the moment…

Hi @oeoeaio!

Ok so here is the différence between the two status (intermediate vs business provider)

  • In the case of an intermediate, the producer in France need to have specific agreements and respect specific norms to be able to sell its products to a reseller (ex: an online shop). Often very small producer don’t have those agreements (and they are not obliged to, but then they can’t sell to resellers…). But they can sell directly to the end user.
  • The status of the intermediate/reseller is subject to other norms, about the accessibility of the selling point for example, the legal obligations for the space used for the delivery (hygiene, handicaped friendly, etc.)
  • Also in terme of insurance, if you are an intermediate, you are legally responsible of something bad happen with a product. If you are a business provider, the producer remains responsible for the product and what happens with it (linked to point 1 I guess). In this model, usually the producer is supposed to come on the delivery day and physically sells himself the products to the end-users (TFA model, I guess that’s why the producers have to come to the delivery also…)
  • You cannot be a non-profit and a reseller in France, so if you want to do a volunteer based work, and take a margin for a cause for example, you cannot be a reseller, or you will reconsidered as a commercial entity.
  • In all the CSA models in France, it’s impossible to buy to the CSA, you always pay directly the producer, or it’s considered as “unfair competition” for other regular stores… So in a CSA, you pay on one side your membership to the CSA, and on the other side you pay directly each producer for the products…

That’s why we need to be able to have one invoice per producer :wink:
@NickWeir don’t you have this problem in UK? In France we got this feedback from CSAs and current hub managers in TFA.

I know @nickwhite is busy with the backoffice translation at the moment, and I don’t know if that’s something you feel familiar with @nickwhite. Let us know @oeoeaio if you have some ideas on the workload that represents … Of course we will need to prioritize that compared with all the other stuff :wink:
And that needs also to go along with a e-wallet payment solution so that the money doesn’t transit through the hub as well (we are working on that as well)

Thanks for your thoughts!