The fun stuff - do you use a Steuerberater / tax-advisor?
Germany - based founders - do you use a Steuerberater?
I got quoted €2,1000 - is this a fair price? Are they worth it?
I have an UG.
Thanks!
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Germany - based founders - do you use a Steuerberater?
I got quoted €2,1000 - is this a fair price? Are they worth it?
I have an UG.
Thanks!
Hi Ronan,
I’m also Berlin based and I have my business for now roughly 8 years. first yes I was just doing like very very small revenue so I was doing the tax stuff myself and man - I can tell you from experience that it will give you headaches, it will give you sleepless nights and you will wish a lot of times you would have a tax advisor.
It’s not about filling out this tax is super hard because you can do it somehow. But I always had the problem that some small things I was not hundred percent sure about and I basically send my tax form thinking did I do something illegal ? or do I do everything right. One year the tax office had a question and it was so complicated I had just like no chance to answer it.so I needed to pay a tax advisor who had to redo the whole year because they cannot just answer a small question without knowing your exact numbers of that year.
So since last year I’m now working with a tax advisor because my revenue went up quite some bit and I am so happy about it.yes sometimes he asks some annoying questions, I have to still collect all the invoices, I have to follow all the rules but the biggest thing is: I can sleep at night peacefully and not worry about anything concerning my taxes.
so About the price it depends a lot on your revenue.because how I learned tax advisors start with a very small price and the more money you make the more cut they wanna have because they wanna grow together with you.it makes sense because the bigger your revenue the more responsibility they have too. so as an example, you pay between 1000 to 4000 a year if you make some thing between 30,000 and 100,000 revenue. It is always depending on how much you make.but good thing is you always can ask a tax advisor and he will tell you exactly how much you have to pay for how much revenue you make. I made a table with the prices and in case he asked me to pay more I can just say hey this is what we agreed on.
Hope this helps,
Max
thanks, yea I have since found a Steuerberater that I have been working with and I am happy with. I would definitely not do it myself after working with him, there are a lot of small things as you said that I would probably miss. I am getting charged a fair price from him, it just took me a little while to find available Steuerberaters and get quotes from them.
Without any insights this cannot be answered sorry.
I'd always go with a tax advisor yes.
I realise now it's quite a broad question! I have since gone with one to be safe.
@mags, so how has your experience been so far?
pretty turbulent!
I'm in the process of finding a new tax advisor as the old one as charging me crazy prices.
For the bookkeeping and Balance Sheet/End of Year Accounts they were charging about €7,000.
I found a new one who is charging €2000 for the same service.
I also realise now that it is not strictly necessary to get a bookkeeper, many founders do it themselves.
May plan was to use Lexoffice (free for 12 months if you have a new company) as my bank account integrates with that and find a bookkeeper that also uses Lexoffice.
If my bookkeeper does not use Lexoffice, I'll probaby use whatever software they are using.
It might be hard to find a bookkeeper that uses Lexoffice AND is reasonably priced AND speaks English, so I may not be able to afford to be too picky.
But even now, I might still do bookkeeping DIY and use the Steuerberateur for the end of year accounts and payroll and communication with finanzamt.
To get the cheaper Stueuerberatuer I searched in other states in Germany - not just Berlin, where they are probably more expensive.
Anyway, it is definitely possible to find a reasonably priced Steuerberatuer!
Similar experience here - we also ended up using Lexoffice together with Holvi (as a bank) . The integration between the two works fine though it doesn't bring you that much forward - you still get to do the bulk of the work.
We also found a reasonably priced accountant for our UG in Berlin that we can talk to online (charged per hour), and who also takes care of the end-of-year accounting for a few hundred EUR. I can forward the details over email if you're interested, though I'm not sure if she or anyone in her office speaks fluent English or if they have the capacity for a new client.
The month-to-month bookkeeping we are now doing ourselves after some consultations/training, but the end-of-year stuff is quite daunting, and we'll likely keep on paying for that one.
I use Hovli as well, it is good to know about that as I was wondering how much leg work that integration would do, it doesn't quite sound like a silver bullet.
Agree with the End of Year accounts - I'll definitely get them done by the accountant in any case.
Yes please send me on the details if you don't mind. my DMs are open https://twitter.com/_ronanmc or my email is ronan at deutschgym.com