How to settle the revenue from the sale of applications on the App Store and Google Play?

Nowadays, when technology is moving forward, newer and newer technologies are being developed and practically everyone has a smartphone or a tablet. Users are faced with platforms such as the App Store or Google Play, which deal with both free and paid provision of various types of applications. So it's no wonder that there are many people who are eager to write applications for sale on the platforms mentioned. Polish regulations require them to tax this type of income.

App Store

As a rule, a person selling their applications does not have to establish a business. Here, Apple pays the creators, so this transaction can be treated as income from the sale of property rights.

However, the key point of this article is to discuss the settlement of such transactions by business entities.

And so, in the case of entrepreneurs, there is an intra-Community provision of services, as the license is sold on the basis of an agreement concluded with Apple based in Luxembourg. Then the place of service is the country of the recipient, so Apple will be responsible for the VAT settlement on this transaction.

Before making a sale to Apple, a Polish entrepreneur must register as an EU VAT taxpayer, which gives him the right to use the European NIP number (the previous NIP number preceded by the PL prefix).

On receipt of payment from Apple, you must issue a sales invoice, which should include both: How to document sales revenue?

• data of the seller and the buyer,
• their NIP numbers with the appropriate prefixes,
• the name of the service, e.g. "License fee for selling applications in the Apple App Store",
• tax rate "eg",
• an amount that should be equal to the value you received from Apple,
• the annotation "reverse charge".

Such an invoice is not sent to Apple because they de facto do not need it.

The intra-community supply of services is reported in the EU VAT summary statement.

Google Play

In this case, in order to sell your applications, you must have a business, because Google is only an intermediary in the transaction. Generally speaking, it is the entrepreneur who is obliged to carry out tax and accounting settlements of this type of operation.

At the outset, it is worth agreeing that the services provided by Google Play constitute the so-called electronic services. The entrepreneur is obliged to keep sales records and to recognize revenues from this sale in the KPiR at the end of the day, but not later than before the sale begins on the next day. Sales records are kept on the basis of current sales reports, available in the so-called developer console on Google Play. The fact that the money is paid out every month does not affect the posting, as the revenue is generated at the time of purchase of the application and not the withdrawal of funds.