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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

The question is always the same: do you really need UG/GmbH at the beginning? It’s typical rookie mistake. I did it too, sold the company for 1€ to some shady people at the end. Gewerbe with 40000€ in the company’s account does not have the problems anymore. And the expensive tax consultants are just another cost of doing business in Germany. Ok, the quality of Finanzamt clerks varies heavily depending on location. Current town has nice ones.

I agree, the process is not easy or nice in Germany, but it’s enough to start businesses despite all the complications and overregulation. But getting VAT number and bank account in other comments mentioned Estonia was huge pita for friends.

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Agreed. In case you do not have big investors, just register as an individual entrepreneur, get a bank account and get going! It can be turned into a LLC/GmbH later if business goes well.

Also taxes will be much easier. Just get one of the countless apps where you add invoices, and they generate tax reports for you. With an LLC or when employing other people, getting a tax consultant is advised. IMO, they are not expensive - how many hours of your time are you willing to spend on this topic instead of paying e.g. 200 EUR/mo?

Can you recommend a tax consultant that charges 200 EUR/month including preparing the yearly statements?

I’m nearly at 3.5k/year and I have barely 10 invoices a month that I need to process between incoming and outgoing lol

It's a good price because the yearly statements for an LLC/GmbH are costly. We pay about 200/mo for accounting - with some more invoices :) -, 100/mo for payrolls but also the yearly statement alone is more than 2k. You can save that by not having an LLC - I personally think the risk in many software businesses is quite low. And some risks must be accepted as an entrepreneur...

Maybe I should have taken another road considering the size of my operations, unfortunately I was wrongly advised when starting up, I spent 1k with a Steuerberatung for advice on what was the proper structure for me, and still… I think they just adviced me the option that was gonna cost me the most to operate.

Lesson learned I guess!

I visited many lectures about business at the university, participated at Munich business plan competitions and all the time holding structure GmbH owning other GmbH was the best solution. The reality is that this is best solution for medium enterprises, for the bootstrapped start it does not matter. If I can’t take off as crappy Gewerbe the expensive holding will not help me either. Learning was not free.

My feeling about tax consultants in Germany is that most of them are scammers helping lazy people to enter mandatory things in corresponding Elster fields. The ones with knowledge are super rare. Better ask AI and then verify the information, that’s cheaper and makes more sense.

Some tax consultants are very shady, and some are really arrogant. I'm currently looking for one as we had some disagreements on pricing with my previous one, and many won't even take me due to my volume, or maybe because I ask to speak English, idk...

But sometimes I feel they are doing me a favor by taking my company, rather than me feeling like I'm hiring them as a service.

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