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Business

bunq Business: banking by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs

September 19, 2019

Turn VAT from a headache into a piece of cake

Taxes, a word that can send a chill up the spine of entrepreneurs everywhere. VAT returns are a particularly time-consuming activity, going through all of your invoices and expenses to try and balance out the amount of VAT you owe.

We have automated this process to give you the option of setting VAT aside on both incoming and outgoing payments to ensure you always have the correct amount when it’s time to submit your returns.

We call this innovative tool Auto VAT. For incoming payments, it works like this:

Let’s say you live in Amsterdam and own a t-shirt printing business. You just sold €100,00 worth of shirts, great job! The invoice to your client including VAT (which is 21% in the Netherlands) would come to €121,00.

Once that invoice arrives in your account, our Auto VAT feature will automatically separate the €21,00 of VAT into a separate account for you, so you never have to worry about having the correct amount again.

Now, what about the VAT on your outgoing business payments?

Let’s imagine In order to fulfill that t-shirt order, you needed to buy some plain white t-shirts that cost you €36,30 including VAT. Outgoing Auto VAT will take the €6,30 from that transaction and subtract it from the €21,00 in your sub-account, which frees up that €6,30 from your outgoings to be used elsewhere!

Auto VAT can be set up very easily in the bunq app, find out how here.

Bulk scan your receipts in seconds

We’ve talked about VAT, but there’s another image that can also strike fear into an entrepreneur’s heart, a shoebox full of receipts. Whether you’re a freelancer looking to submit expenses to your employer/bookkeeper or a business owner with months of receipts to sift through, the ‘receipt shoebox’ is a time-consuming hassle.

As part of bunq Update 12, we have made this process completely painless and efficient to save you time and effort. You can now take photos of all your receipts directly in the bunq app in one go, and our AI will then match those receipts to the relevant payments using a date range you submit.

From there, the receipts can be exported with a tap in the app and be sent to your bookkeeper or employer, for example, for processing. So not only do we save you time with the calculation of your expenses, we also make the submission process stress-free!

See here for more information regarding this exciting new feature and get ready to kiss your shoebox full of receipts goodbye!

Instantly resolve failed card payments

No one likes it when card payments fail. To help solve this particularly irritating problem, we created the ability to instantly initiate a refund on failed card transactions directly from the bunq app.

Imagine you try to make a payment to a merchant with your bunq card and for some reason your bank processes the payment, but the merchant rejects it. In the past, the money would be unavailable for you to use until the merchant recognized the error and refunded you, which could take some businesses up to 30 days.

Now you can undo the payment with a tap in the app, and we’ll take it from there! We commit to a timeline and you even get a live countdown on the number of days left for us to resolve the payment.

This isn’t the most common of issues but one that we thought could be made easier and more time-effective, reaffirming our commitment to saving our bunq Business community time and effort to allow them to focus on what really matters: running their business!

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