YouRent: insurance and tax reporting for a Sharetribe rental marketplace

The client

YouRent, an Estonian rental marketplace, allowed both people and companies to rent out things they don’t use every day, from sports gear and party supplies to home office equipment.

The challenge

A rental needs more than a booking and a payment. It needs insurance to be part of each booking, income from private people and companies to be taxed differently, and the data ready for accounting. YouRent’s marketplace already ran on Sharetribe, so we extended it.

What we built

• Insurance in every booking Renters accept the insurance terms at checkout and enter their personal or company details. Insurance applies by the category of the item, and each booking gets a policy number and a PDF policy in two languages that both sides can download. The policy data is saved with the booking, so later changes to the settings never rewrite an existing policy.
• Income tax withheld from payouts Tax is calculated and withheld from the owner's payout automatically, differently for private people and companies. Owners see it in their payout breakdown, while the price the renter sees stays the same. Delivery cost reimbursements are left out of the tax base, and full refunds work within the usual booking flow.
• Tax reports for the operator The operator sees tax reports for any period, such as a month, and exports them to CSV in the Estonian number format for spreadsheets. Each row has the owner's ID code and the booking's financial data. Access checks protect the sensitive data, and amounts in different currencies are kept apart.

We also updated the Sharetribe Web Template base, set up a test environment with automated tests of the booking flow, and improved the security settings, payout status notifications and how booking documents and reports are shown.

The result

Insurance, tax and reporting became part of the booking itself. The policy and its document stayed with the booking and tax withholding became part of the payout, so nobody worked it out by hand after each rental, and the operator got the tax data in one place for accounting.