Self-Bill Invoice Generation — Improvements

General Feedback & Requests
1

I can get FAB’s Self-Bill Invoice from this page by clicking the “Download” button.

1st issue

It doesn’t contain valuable information like the Unity Asset Store document.

For example, I need an Issue Date to convert USD to Local Currency based on this date for tax purposes.

I only have this date on the Web Interface in the “Payouts” tab: 2025-01-31 — but I have no such date in this PDF document which shows: 1/12/2024 - 31/12/2024

2nd issue

For now, I only have monthly generation doc.

This is not obvious to tax authority about seeing “-” value in “Net Unit Sold” section and counting the sale from previous month which is overlapped with previous month. As I understand, such a situation happens when the $100 threshold was not reached in the previous month.

I need a document not for a month, but for the whole payout period like on Unity’s document with Issue Date, Invoice Number, Whole Payout Period (Not a Month), Sender Address.

Please improve your file generation.

2

I agree!
I didn’t had a tax inspection yet but I’m afraid to get one with such “unofficial-looking” document!

3

This is a significant concern for me as well. I get nervous with every payment because I know I don’t have the proper documentation for the tax authorities. While HyperWallet provides some transaction details that we can print, they are not exactly invoices. For every payment, Epic should issue a document that includes at least the payer’s name, logo and address, payment amount, service description, and the payee’s name. Unity asset store does that.

4

The thing is that’s not a self bill invoice. That’s just a payout report. UEM also never had this kind of feature. It actually was a whole lot of pain to figure out how to properly tax my income from this (I went through multiple accounting firms). Having good documentation would be really convenient.

5

Any update on this? @smith.sd @DougE

Here is the company info they provide with their payment reports (it’s flawed, details below):

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Epic Games Commerce GmbH
Platz 10
6039 Root D4,
Switzerland

Swiss Tax Number:
CHE-358.969.724

EU-VAT No.
EU528001425 ← this is totally wrong. Private companies can not have VATs starting with EU… . Only EU institutions have such VATs. These EU VATs can not be verified via VIES and thus no reverse-charge can be claimed legally.

Actually not even their swiss tax id / company name is correct.

If you try to validate that UID (CHE-358.969.724 ) you find this:
https://www.uid.admin.ch/Detail.aspx?uid_id=CHE-358.969.724
with this address and company name:

Epic Games International S.à r.l., Luxembourg, Zweigniederlassung Root
Platz 10
6039 Root D4
Switzerland
VAT-ID: CHE-358.969.724

Funny that the VAT-ID is listed as “Deleted”:

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However if you search by the company name that is on the payout report (Epic Games Commerce GmbH) then you get this:
https://www.uid.admin.ch/Detail.aspx?uid_id=CHE-282.136.859
Epic Games Commerce GmbH
Platz 10
6039 Root D4
Switzerland
VAT-ID: CHE-282.136.859 (← notice the different VAT-ID)

So either their company NAME on the report is wrong or their VAT-ID is wrong and we are left guessing which is the correct one :man_shrugging: . Also this means NO VAT REVERSE-CHARGE since Switzerland is a third-country according to EU tax law.

I also tried to verify their given EU528001425 VAT ID as a luxembourgian one and of course it does not validate either. Not sure where they got that from but I think it’s best to just ignore it. Luckily (as ar as I know) I can treat this as “non-taxable third-country supply“ which means no VAT to deduct or report as long as I can be sure the company that pays me is not within the EU.

If you searc the swiss registry for “Epic Games” you actually find quite a lot of entries:

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I find all of this very strange :thinking:.

I also found this (ancient) post (source) seemingly from an Unreal employee who claims that epic does pay the VAT for the clients (good new for us publishers). Though that info is old. Would be nice if someone from Epic could clarify.

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OT - Btw.: if anyone is purchasing from Epic as a company and wants to try reverse-charge or properly handle VAT. There seems to be a form for registring your VAT (which apparently one can not do easily as a customer): https://epicgames.formstack.com/forms/vat_invoice_requesthttps://epicgames.formstack.com/forms/vat_invoice_request (source)

UPDATE: Added some more infos concerning their VAT-ID.

6

Do you know if Unreal is properly deducting (and delivering) the VAT for us publishers? I once asked them but received no proper answer.

1 Like
7

I’m assuming it is so. They are the proper VAT payer and they do business with end customers and us. We don’t sell anything directly to end customers on Fab.

1 Like
8

Thanks, yes I think so too. I did some digging and updated my post above with more infos. What their real VAT-ID is, is still a mystery to me. All I know for sure is that this EU… VAT is probably just false. Better just assume (for VAT purposes) that they are a swiss company with either CHE-358.969.724 or CHE-282.136.859 as VAT-ID (more likely CHE-282.136.859 if you ask me).

1 Like
9

Yea, this EU VAT no is weird. I use this info for invoicing (as this is what they provide), but it’s not a standard EU VAT format (it should be CHE as you mentioned or some other country) and you cannot validate that number in VIES system. The last one you showed, can be validated in some “VAT validation app” (I never used this before, so idk how reliable it is) as:

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