The screen was the easy part
Blog post #52
What started as “is there a good monitor on sale?” ended as a small crash course in running a company. The hardware decision took ten minutes. The paperwork around it — buying through the AB, from a foreign seller, with the right VAT treatment, paid the right way — took the rest of the afternoon. Worth writing down, because every part of it will repeat.
What shipped
A new LG 27US550-W — 27” 4K IPS — ordered and paid through Aelg AB. My wife had quietly absorbed my second screen into her workstation, so I needed a replacement. The interesting part wasn’t the box; it was everything around it.
Decisions made
Sharpness over speed. For coding, pixel density beats refresh rate. A 4K panel at ~163 ppi renders text far crisper than my old QHD at ~109 ppi, and 60 Hz is a non-issue for static text. I skipped the pricier 144 Hz 4K panels and the USB-C models — I run a desktop, so single-cable laptop charging is a feature I’d pay for and never use.
Buy direct, through the company. A work monitor is a deductible tool (arbetsredskap), expensed directly since it’s well under the threshold. Buying with the company card beats buying privately and reimbursing myself — one ledger entry instead of two.
Pay by bank transfer, not card. More on that below.
What I learned the hard way
Foreign seller = reverse-charge VAT. Proshop is Danish. That makes this an intra-EU acquisition, not a normal domestic purchase. The correct option is a net invoice (0% VAT) under reverse charge: the seller bills without VAT, and I account for it myself — 25% output VAT and 25% input VAT that cancel out to zero, reported in the annual VAT return. The price dropped from 2 492 kr to 1 993,60 kr at checkout, which was also the confirmation that the company’s VAT number was actually live. (Worth knowing the difference between the F-tax certificate and VAT registration here — they’re separate decisions, and only the VAT one matters for this.)
Business cards carry a surcharge. At payment, the Visa/Mastercard options added “up to 2.46% for corporate cards.” That’s not the shop being greedy — the EU caps interchange fees on consumer cards at ~0.3%, but corporate cards are exempt, so they genuinely cost the merchant more and the fee gets passed on. On ~2 000 kr that’s ~49 kr. The fix: a plain bank transfer (förskottsbetalning) — zero fee, and a cleaner line in the books since it moves straight from the company account.
Tooling & process
The whole thing ran as a conversation with Claude — researching panels, checking live Swedish prices, catching that a cheap DisplayPort cable was only rated DP 1.1a (4K@30 Hz, useless here) when the monitor ships with a perfectly good HDMI cable anyway, and updating three memory files as decisions landed: the company’s bookkeeping notes, the hardware wiki, and the global profile. The purchase is logged as an EU acquisition with reverse-charge VAT, ready to reconcile when the invoice arrives.
The lesson that generalizes: for a one-person company, the cost of a thing is never just the price tag. It’s the VAT mechanism, the payment rail, and the paper trail — and getting those right the first time is cheaper than fixing them at year-end.
— Stefan