Same in the UK, but for instances where you can't get a fully valid invoice, you can either "self invoice" (so the "fill in your own invoice" approach) or just whatever receipt you get as long as you feel happy defending it to a tax inspector later on.
If you use US companies for services in a European business, you are almost certainly going to have invoices every month that don't meet EU regulations at all and you just have to make it work.
He said in his tweet about this that when he does it to Europeans (specifically Germans, I think) they just get even madder.
I mean great if there are legal requirements for invoices, but who enforces them, how likely is enforcement, and what’s the end result for a US-based company with no physical presence in The Netherlands?
The real issue is with the local (European) company when they claim the expense against profits and the tax inspector turns their nose up at the invoice/receipt.
Being in the UK, we tend to work on a system where things are taken in context and you can defend such decisions. Maybe other tax regimes are more restrictive, but the British way is always that you can have a debate with authorities and usually they will see sense in your reasoning if you're not trying to defraud them.
Just to make this kind of confusing story less confusing—the Pinboard guy prints valid invoices (in order to be legally compliant, and because he's "not a totally evil guy"). Someone (from Germany) asked him to add Company Name to the invoice, and he replied by saying "just edit the HTML to add whatever you need".
Ha, the tweets I remember are from years and years ago. Maybe 2015? Really funny that the invoice thing has been such a consistent part of the Pinboard Experience for so long.
Since this predates threads, I can’t find all the tweets but this is one of them:
