On the heels of acquiring sales tax specialist TaxJar in April, today Stripe is making another big move in the area of tax.
The $95 billion payments behemoth is launching a new product called Stripe Tax, which will provide automatic, updated sales tax calculations (covering sales tax, VAT and GST) and related accounting services to Stripe payments customers initially in some 30 countries and across the U.S. Stripe Tax is a separate service from TaxJar, but the two are not unconnected. As Stripe Tax was being built out of Stripe’s offices in Dublin over the last several months, Stripe’s business lead for EMEA Matt Henderson told me that the team had identified TaxJar as a strong company in the field. That ultimately led to M&A between them. Sales tax — and specifically a more seamless way to deal with charging and tracking sales tax — is a painful issue for people doing business online.