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Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

paolino.me

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Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#301

Post by weinzierl »

earcar wrote: post #155
weinzierl wrote: post #126

Not to defend German bureaucracy but if you are serious and want results this is not how you do it. If you want a GmbH quickly there are specialized lawyers that maintain a pool of freshly founded GmbH's for you to buy. Everything is set up for you to start. If you don't like certain things like the company name, you can always change it later. That being said, I know plenty of people who founded their GmbH themselve…

> there are specialized lawyers that maintain a pool of freshly founded GmbH's for you to buy It doesn't sound easy nor cheap to buy a company and change the company name. UG & Co. KG has a couple of advantages and while it did add some money and time to the table, it doesn't change the story. Notaries in the US are the price of a dinner. Many people have waited up to 6 months to receive their VAT ID from Berlin.

I don't think domestic invoices should be reissued once the VAT ID arrives.

So, the story is really that it takes a couple of weeks for a freshly founded company to be ready to invoice customers outside of Germany, which I agree, is a sad state.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#302

Post by Schlagbohrer »

earcar wrote: post #109
robtro wrote: post #65

Germany is one of the worst countries when it comes to bureaucracy nothing is fast here if you go the legal path and stay within the law (which is mostly for small people big players have different ways) and as you see everything costs a lot so if you are founding a pure online business do yourself a favor and incorporate somewhere else and if you still live in Germany look into licensing or subcontracting yourself t…

I have yet to find the mythical efficiency everyone was talking about. Trains, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, this. It's rules and adherence to rules, more than efficiency, that I've found in my experience.

It's a mistake to think Germany is efficient, I don't know where they got that stereotype.

Germans are thorough, not efficient.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#305

Post by [deleted] »

Zak wrote: post #274
rob74 wrote: post #165

> Which leaves the only real question. Why 25,000 at all? It is my company and my risk. If I want to start with nothing, that is my call, not a toll the state collects before it will let me try. And the cheap door has a price of its own: to some clients, “UG” reads as “not serious,” and they would rather deal with a GmbH. The structure built to let me in quietly marks me for using it. The 25,000 is there to make sure…

> A company that starts with nothing wouldn't be a GmbH (limited liability company), it would be a GoH (company without liability), and there's a good reason why those don't exist... Those do exist in other countries. An LLC in the USA does not generally need to have a certain amount of assets. Such a company is more or less without liability until it has some assets; the worst case for its owners when it comes to a…

[deleted]

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#306

Post by shermantanktop »

fredsters_s wrote: post #79

it is very funny that most of the (presumably germans) in the comments are saying "it's not that bad and it's fine because you chose a complicated LLC structure"

This is what happens with complex organizations. People develop expertise in navigating the organization, feel pride in that expertise, and then snottily mock those who struggle. Even though they didn’t create it, don’t really like it, and have no stake in it.

But it is all arbitrary bureaucracy with little value beyond its own internal logic. Still gets fanboys somehow.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#307

Post by logifail »

_fat_santa wrote: post #276
WarmWash wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are jealous of the US system where you can create an LLC in one hour for $200, and by the next day be doing business with all your personal assets isolated.

The US system is built to support entrepreneurship while the EU system broadly is to support the consumer and employee. The US will never be able to match the EU's consumer and employee protections and the EU will never be able to match the US's ease of doing business, because to have one you have to fundamentally give in on the other. Depending on who you ask, one system is wildly better than the other, but at the e…

> The US system is built to support entrepreneurship while the EU system broadly is to support the consumer and employee

I disagree: the EU system broadly is there to support _the incumbants_

"Regulatory capture" is the less kind way to put it.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#308

Post by rayiner »

Zak wrote: post #274
rob74 wrote: post #165

> Which leaves the only real question. Why 25,000 at all? It is my company and my risk. If I want to start with nothing, that is my call, not a toll the state collects before it will let me try. And the cheap door has a price of its own: to some clients, “UG” reads as “not serious,” and they would rather deal with a GmbH. The structure built to let me in quietly marks me for using it. The 25,000 is there to make sure…

> A company that starts with nothing wouldn't be a GmbH (limited liability company), it would be a GoH (company without liability), and there's a good reason why those don't exist... Those do exist in other countries. An LLC in the USA does not generally need to have a certain amount of assets. Such a company is more or less without liability until it has some assets; the worst case for its owners when it comes to a…

Not quite. In the US this condition is handled at the back end. Running a corporation or LLC without sufficient capitalization can be grounds for piercing the liability shield in a lawsuit.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#309

Post by lnz_me »

I grew up in Germany and Austria and did my first startups there, then went to New Zealand and built startups there and currently live in Portugal and built startups there. Europe is broken beyond believe. I moved everything back to New Zealand because the bureaucracy, the level of compliance, the insane inefficient here is killing me. if the EU is serious about wanting to build a meaningful startup scene then it has to listen to EUinc, drop its completely unfounded arrogance and learn from others. So looking forward to leaving again. I highly recommend founders in the EU to found in a sane county, if inside EU is a hard requirement, look at Estonia and Lithuania, skip the rest.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#310

Post by markvdb »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #260
markvdb wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I set up a US llc as a Belgian while residing in Belgium, Belgian tax authorities will claim the center of control is in Belgium and claim it is a Belgian company.

will they do the registration for you too?

Of course not. They'll just claim your llc needs to pay local corporate income taxe, VAT, pay local social security, dividend withholding tax, ... on top of whatever needs to happen to keep US authorities happy.
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