Re Organisation

[bapages]

The VAT bit below is quite important that you need to declare this rate to the VAT man and I think that you will need to fill another form out of actual invoices from EU states.

With a view to providing better service to our Publishers, we wanted to inform and notify you of a change to ValueClick Europe Limited trading as Commission Junction Europe.

As part of a corporate reorganisation ValueClick Europe Limited has assigned all Commission Junction contracts and agreements to ValueClick International Limited, with headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. From the 1st day of April 2009 all existing agreements between ValueClick Europe Limited and you will be transferred to ValueClick International Limited.

ValueClick International is registered in Ireland and is subject to VAT in Ireland, therefore there will be changes on the basis that VAT is applied.
We also take this opportunity to advise you that unless we hear otherwise from you from the 1st day of April 2009 your contractual relationship with ValueClick Europe Limited will terminate and be replaced with ValueClick International Limited. Please also note that ValueClick international Limited operates materially identical terms and conditions in its Publisher’s Services Agreement as ValueClick Europe Limited. By continuing to work with us from the 1st day of April 2009 it shall be deemed (unless we are otherwise informed by you in writing) that you agree to ValueClick International Limited’s standard terms and conditions and such terms and conditions shall be applicable and binding as between you and ValueClick International Limited.

Rest assured that this change will not affect the day to day running of the Commission Junction business in the UK and Europe. Your contacts will remain unaltered and you should continue to address all correspondence to our London address: Oxford House, 180 Upper Richmond Road, SW15 2SH.

If you have any queries about this change then please email vcintlqueries@valueclick.com.

We thank you for your continued custom and look forward to continuing to work with you to support your business goals.

[Shimrit]

This is only if you're VAT registered, right?

[master]

Does this rules affect International clients.

[ashagplz]

yet again CJ leave more questions than they answer. :td

[Cheryl Ingram]

Hi there,

I understand that this change does raise a few questions for some of you and we are working through them at the moment. It is not our intention to leave any questions unanswered and we have finance pulling together a note regarding the VAT query which will be posted here later today.

As per the orginal post, we have set up a dedicated inbox for all queries relating to this announcement and it would help us if you used this so we can monitor and if necessary post on any/all consistent themes. vcintlqueries@valueclick.com

Kind Regards

Cheryl Ingram
UK Client Development Director

[pollensa]

The VAT bit below is quite important that you need to declare this rate to the VAT man and I think that you will need to fill another form out of actual invoices from EU states.

As affiliates, we do not need to fill in any forms. In future for me CJ will be another customer based in the EU as are Amazon - I also have several Spanish business customers. If we invoice an EU customer (excl UK) for services we have to show their VAT number on the invoice & charge zero VAT. They then have to account for the VAT as both a sale & a purchase on their VAT return as part of the EU reverse charge agreement. If CJ self-bill, as they do now, then they will have to produce an appropriate invoice on our behalf.

If any of you are signed up for Adwords & are VAT registered you can see the sort of invoice they produce as an example of an invoice between 2 EU countries.

[Cheryl Ingram]

Hi there,

As a follow up to my earlier post, I wanted to clarify the VAT implications for both advertisers and publishers alike:

ValueClick International Ltd
General information on the change in treatment of VAT

From the 1st of April 2009 all contracts under ValueClick Europe Limited will be ceded over to ValueClick International Limited, the Irish entity, and all advertiser and publisher billing and payments for activity after the 1st of April 2009 will comply with the VAT legislation in Ireland.

What impact will this have on me?


Publishers

1.All commissions generated by publishers domiciled outside of Ireland from the 1 April 2009 will not have VAT applied and paid. Only VAT registered Irish publishers (who have input their VAT number in their account in CJM) will have VAT applied to their commissions and paid out.

2.All commissions generated prior to the 1 April 2009 but then paid out after the 1 April 2009 will be subject to the local VAT rate, for the UK this could be 17.5% or 15% depending on event date of the transaction.

3.After transition, it will be possible for a time for publishers to receive commissions relating to both the ValueClick Europe (UK) contracted activity, and ValueClick International (Irish) contracted activity. This will all be based on the EVENT date of the commission

In this case, to account for the different VAT legislations, publishers may therefore receive two separate invoices for one single payment from the 20th of April onwards.

If this is the case, ValueClick Europe Limited commissions will have the relevant VAT rate applied (17.5% and/or 15%) and ValueClick International Limited commissions will have no VAT applied (except for VAT registered Irish publishers).


Advertisers

1.Billing for April activity, now billed from ValueClick International Ltd, will not have VAT charged to advertisers domiciled outside of Ireland. Only Irish domiciled advertisers will be charged VAT on activity from the 1 April 2009 onwards at the applicable Irish VAT rate, currently 21.5%.

2.For UK and certain EU advertisers who are currently contracted with ValueClick Europe Limited, the first VAT invoice from ValueClick International, after the transition date, will be sent out for April activity on or around the 1st of May 2009.

Again, if anyone has any further queries in this regard, please feel free to send an email to us using the following email address: vcintlqueries@valueclick.com

Kind Regards

Cheryl Ingram
UK Client Development Director

[SpongeBob]

Thanks for that - many of us do our own accounting and so any advice helps!

One other thing, which has probably been mentioned a few times - are there any plans to provide affiliates with a facility to print off invoices?

All the other networks do this and it is a bit of a pain that CJ don't as while we do get emailed the invoices, occasionally they go astray. It'd be really good to be able to log on and print off invoices for the payments we've received.

[retrolink]

Publishers

....

3.After transition, it will be possible for a time for publishers to receive commissions relating to both the ValueClick Europe (UK) contracted activity, and ValueClick International (Irish) contracted activity. This will all be based on the EVENT date of the commission

In this case, to account for the different VAT legislations, publishers may therefore receive two separate invoices for one single payment from the 20th of April onwards.

...

Relating to the part in Bold above (Publishers 3.), has anyone actually received 2 invoices from CJ?

I received a self-bill invoice from CJ on June 1st 2009 with the extracted details as below (fictitious amounts substituted and sorry for the bad formatting):

********************************************
Invoice Date: 30th April 2009

Bill to: Commission Junction, Cambridge House, 180 Upper Richmond Road, London, SW15 2SH

Self-billing invoice for publisher payment made to you on the 20th April 2009.
This will relate to commissions generated before Mar-09.

Commission amounts 60 GBP
Commission amounts applicable for VAT at 15%(any withdrawal amounts in month added back for VAT calculation) 1000 GBP
Total VAT@15% 150 GBP
--------------------------------------------
Total 1210 GBP
--------------------------------------------
********************************************

Usually my invoices show the Commission amount, and the Commission amount subject to VAT, to be the same but not in the most recent invoice as shown above.

In the self-bill invoice above there is 15% VAT (150 GBP) charged on the 1000 GBP, but there is no mention of what the 60 GBP is for and why no VAT has been applied to it. I am wondering if this is supposed to be a Commission amount for the new ValueClick International (Ireland)? If it is, why would the "Bill to" address be a UK address instead of an Irish address? Has anyone else seen this in their recent invoices?

I am hoping to get an explanation for this from CJ so that I can explain it to my accountant and the VAT investigation team if they ever come knocking.

Cheers,

Nick

[retrolink]

One other thing, which has probably been mentioned a few times - are there any plans to provide affiliates with a facility to print off invoices?

All the other networks do this and it is a bit of a pain that CJ don't as while we do get emailed the invoices, occasionally they go astray. It'd be really good to be able to log on and print off invoices for the payments we've received.

A facility to print off CJ invoices would be great, especially when the invoices sent out sometimes don't reach my inbox...

[pollensa]

In the self-bill invoice above there is 15% VAT (150 GBP) charged on the 1000 GBP, but there is no mention of what the 60 GBP is for and why no VAT has been applied to it. I am wondering if this is supposed to be a Commission amount for the new ValueClick International (Ireland)? If it is, why would the "Bill to" address be a UK address instead of an Irish address? Has anyone else seen this in their recent invoices?

My latest invoice has nothing in 'Commission Amounts' & a figure (which I haven't checked yet) in 'Commission amounts applicable for VAT'.

As you say if this other amount is with zero VAT then the Bill To should be to a non-UK address as we have to charge VAT to UK customers. You should be able to compare the invoice with the Payment report on the CJ page (Payment Status » Payment History » Payment Reconciliation) . I normally check these off against the commission I've earned in order to keep track of payments (& any lack of them!).

[retrolink]

My latest invoice has nothing in 'Commission Amounts' & a figure (which I haven't checked yet) in 'Commission amounts applicable for VAT'.

As you say if this other amount is with zero VAT then the Bill To should be to a non-UK address as we have to charge VAT to UK customers. You should be able to compare the invoice with the Payment report on the CJ page (Payment Status » Payment History » Payment Reconciliation) . I normally check these off against the commission I've earned in order to keep track of payments (& any lack of them!).

Thanks for your reply Pollensa, your comments made me look into the figures more deeply. My hunch is that the Commission Amounts figure is to do with Performance Incentives - see below.

It appears that the recent invoice I mentioned is not related to the ValueClick International (Ireland) at all, but it looks almost certainly that CJ have underpaid my VAT.

What CJ have done is to charge VAT on all my commissions except on one Performance Incentive that I have monthly (this performance incentive is the figure represented by the "Commission Amounts" row in my previous example).

In previous months CJ have always charged VAT on my Performance Incentives, so why has this suddenly changed? I have noticed this month that the email address the invoices come from is MojoMail (MojoMail@z2c.net) instead of finance@cj.com, so maybe they could have a new system and an initial glitch? Just my hunch.

In any case, I'll be contacting CJ for what I believe to be my missing VAT and hopefully their Self-Billing invoice system can be updated to reflect the error and I can get a more accurate invoice.

Maybe I'm wrong, but does anyone know of a reason why VAT wouldn't be charged on a performance incentive now whereas it was charged over previous months and years? Has anyone else had a similar problem with VAT on Performance Incentives?

Cheers,

Nick

[retrolink]

This is probably going off-track of the new Organisation topic now but, if you receive VAT on your CJ invoices, make sure you check out your latest payment as soon as possible.

I haven't received the self-bill invoice for a payment on May 19th 2009, but can see some alarming figures in Payment History > Payment Reconciliation.

Totalling my Sales, Leads and Performance Incentives, I seem to have been paid a total of 10.43% VAT. What's happened to the missing 4.53% VAT? Even assuming some basic mistakes, this is almost unbelievable and very worrying.

Nick

[Daniel Powel]

Hi all,

Thank you for your questions. Hopefully I can shed some light on your queries.

In any given month, your invoice most likely contains transactions that have occurred in multiple months, as some advertisers pay immediately and other do not.

As you know, recently we switched our business entity to one which now resides in Ireland. As UK business entity, we were required to apply VAT to all UK resident invoices, but not for other countries. As an Irish entity, will apply VAT to Irish publishers.

For this reason, if you are a UK resident and you've received and invoice recently, there is a strong chance the you have transactions that are pre changeover (VAT applied) and post change, (VAT not applied). This is why the aggregate VAT in your invoice would be lower.

Please do not construe this email to be in any way a substitute for speaking to a qualified professional for any questions you may have. That said, I hope this provides some clarity.

If you have any specific questions for us, please drop me an email and I can get you in contact with our finance department.

Thank you,
Daniel Powel
dpowel@cj.com

[retrolink]

Hi all,

Thank you for your questions. Hopefully I can shed some light on your queries.

In any given month, your invoice most likely contains transactions that have occurred in multiple months, as some advertisers pay immediately and other do not.

As you know, recently we switched our business entity to one which now resides in Ireland. As UK business entity, we were required to apply VAT to all UK resident invoices, but not for other countries. As an Irish entity, will apply VAT to Irish publishers.

For this reason, if you are a UK resident and you've received and invoice recently, there is a strong chance the you have transactions that are pre changeover (VAT applied) and post change, (VAT not applied). This is why the aggregate VAT in your invoice would be lower.

Please do not construe this email to be in any way a substitute for speaking to a qualified professional for any questions you may have. That said, I hope this provides some clarity.

If you have any specific questions for us, please drop me an email and I can get you in contact with our finance department.

Thank you,
Daniel Powel
dpowel@cj.com

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your reply and I appreciate your input on this.

Given the case you outlined, that there are multiple transactions for pre changeover (VAT applied) and post change (VAT not applied), I still cannot understand why CJ are sending a combined Invoice that is registered with a pre-changeover UK address and not separating them out into the 2 distinct ValueClick entities like we were told "may" happen.

My last self-bill invoice stated that ValueClick International Limited took over all contracts from April 1st 2009 and all commissions will be based on the EVENT date of the commission. Given this, and looking at my "Payment Status / Payment History / Payment Reconciliation" for my 2 latest payments, all my "Month/Event Dates" have been post March 31st 2009. So if the Event Date statement (in bold above) is indeed true, there should be no VAT applied to any of my last 2 payments because the Event Dates are all after the changeover. This doesn't appear to be what has happened though.

Is there any way of finding out through the CJ interface which items are truly pre-change, and post-change, because it seems impossible to tell from the way it is currently setup? Are there any reports that we can run?

Everything would be so much simpler if two invoices were sent out for the pre- and post-change entities which I was under the impression that CJ was going to do from the emails that were originally sent out.

Although I am not a VAT or Tax expert, having a self-bill invoice for a UK registered company where part of the invoice is not subject to UK VAT seems a little unusual especially when a proportion of the earnings should actually be attributed to the Irish company anyway.

Currently I have a CJ self-bill invoice where part of the earnings may not even be from the company that the invoice is made out from. This strikes me as being wrong and I have asked my accountant for his opinion on this. If a part of the payment is supposed to be from the Irish company, why is not quoted as such on the invoice? or a separate invoice generated?

I have already contacted the CJ Finance team about this (not through Ask a Question as it wasn't working), but have had no reply on my queries yet.

Kind regards,
Nick