cooner
patreon
Sales Tax Update, Part 2
🕑 Added 2020-05-20 21:00:02 +0000 UTCHello friends! Today Patreon released its Advanced Sales Tax Settings, so I went through and did a preliminary set-up, and wanted to keep you all updated as to how I set things up. My goal is to make this as painless for my patrons as possible, while still keeping this legal and fair. I may gave to go in and tweak these settings later, we'll see.
The way the settings work is that for each tier, the artist creates a list of what benefits are provided to that tier, and what percentage each benefit is worth. These lists and percentages will be used to figure out what is taxable in each patron's jurisdiction, and how much the sales tax should be.
Benefit/Tier Breakdowns
One of the "benefits" you can choose is called "General Support," which means patrons are simply giving money to support their favorite artists. This shouldn't be taxable anywhere, as there's no tangible good being exchanged. I set this benefit at a fairly high percentage (around 50% for most tiers, higher for the upper tiers) because, and I'm being totally honest here, I really do feel like many of you are supporting this page simply because you want to support my work. And yes, I'm always appreciative of that. <3
As for other benefits: There is a "Private Community" item that covers the Discord channel. I had to include this but ranked it very low (10% to 2% depending on the value of the tier) since I see folks using the Discord channel but it doesn't seem to be a primary goal for folks who signed up. I also included "Comic Strip Early Access," "Comic Page Early Access, and "Development Content" at varying levels for tiers depending on what regular content you see, comics or behind-the-scenes stuff.
Finally, for my handful of Brobdingnagian patrons: I set your "General Support" level VERY high (75%) because, really, your generosity is clear in supporting me and my work. I did have to add in a commission item for your Monthly Quick Sketch, which I put at 10% of the value of your pledge, since that seems about the right price for quick sketches.
In Conclusion
I'm sorry for the hassle, but hopefully this will be relatively painless for folks once they begin charging sales tax in July. If anyone has any specific questions, please feel free to comment below or note me privately. And if you run into any issues that seem unfair once they do start collecting sales tax, please let me know and I'll see if there's anything we can do! And as before, you can follow these links for more information or to contact Patreon with your questions:
For more information: New Sales Tax Requirements on Patreon
For further questions: Patreon Customer Support Team Request
Thank you again for your support … please stay safe and healthy! I'm actively working on My Bigger Boyfriend and Kaiju Attack, looking forward to releasing strips and pages soon. :)
Comments
Cooner
This is part of the ongoing efforts by states to reign in online shopping and make sure they collect appropriate sales tax. The target is big companies like Amazon, but the laws are written loosely enough that they affect businesses all the way down. As I understand it Patreon hopes to lobby to perhaps exempt small independent creators, but we'll see if they have any luck!
Tyler Furlong
Just checked what my sales tax is and surprisingly, Alaska doesn’t have one. Still, this doesn’t feel fair to anyone. Hope they fix this
