We shifted payments from multiple channels into a single web funnel to centralize VAT reporting. The idea was to have one exportable source of truth: gateway invoices and a single subscription ledger. It made reconciling by country and preparing OSS filings much simpler.
The trade offs: you must be strict about data capture (billing country, VAT ID) at checkout, and watch attribution so you still understand which campaign drove the sale. Also tax obligations can change as you expand, so control is great but you still need to limit the regions you open to the web until your tax process is solid.
What process did you use to map web funnel payments into your accounting system for VAT returns?
We funneled payments to one gateway and scheduled weekly exports. That gave finance a single CSV for OSS.
I used Web2Wave to keep UTM and user properties attached to each payment so we could still see channel performance in the export.
Centralizing payments made reporting easier and experiments faster. I could change flows and keep tax logic unchanged because the gateway handled VAT.
This also let me segment revenue by campaign cleanly since UTMs were preserved in the funnel. The time saved on reconciliations justified the switch.
One export is a lifesaver for small teams.
We kept a mapping table from gateway country codes to our accounting region codes and it paid off.
one funnel one export
way easier
Centralization helps but do two things well. First, capture durable identifiers (invoice id, subscription id, utm) and store them in your DB. Second, build a small ETL that maps gateway fields to accounting codes and then runs checks (net vs gross per country). That ETL is your safety net and is far cheaper than manual reconciliations when you scale.
Make sure refunds and chargebacks are accounted for in the same export. They change VAT liabilities and often get forgotten.
We limited the web funnel to EU countries where we had clear tax rules first.
That reduced surprises.
Also test your export when you add a new country.
Invoice formats can change.