[tschwimmer]

WARNING: UNEDUCATED AND POTENTIALLY IRRELEVANT AMERO-CENTRIC OPINIONS BELOW

I tend to agree with the other commenter, this guy should have registered as an individual without his VAT number and just use whatever receipt they gave him to claim the expense. I'm far too lazy to deep dive into French tax but a quick skim of [0] indicates that you can submit a "receipt" in addition to an invoice. Sure you can get audited but I would bet (and seriously, I'd love to take this bet at any reasonable set of odds, Author DM me) that no French tax auditor is going to be like "SACRE BLEU, clearly you're trying to deduct your super luxurious vacation to the programming language conference ILLEGALLY!" I'm sure 20 minute conversation would clarify any outstanding concerns they might have about this specific issue.

And I honestly find it kind of hard to fault the Conference organizers for this one. True, they clearly failed to account for this " Entreprise Individuelle" (we call it Sole Proprietorship in the states) case when defining the company/not company ticket scheme, but if you pushed me I'd categorize EI as a company too. It's sort of a non-company company, but they clearly think that people who are attending in direct relation to their business are willing to pay more.

tl;dr just ask them to remove your VAT ID and reissue the ticket.

[0]https://qonto.com/en/blog/business-creation/freelancer/all-a...

[janosdebugs]

Having a business in Europe is significantly more complicated than in the US with lots of rules to follow. France seems to be especially strict if your business expenses need to be on a separate accout, that isn't the case in other EU countries. However, it's worth noting that with a VAT ID the ticket also becomes cheaper because the 20% VAT for France doesn't get added.