The wall.
No, but you still have to file.
This one I don’t know. I charge GST on my (few) clients even though I don’t exceed the $100000 limit.
It doesn’t really matter if you pay or not pay GST. If your price is $10000. They’ll pay the $10500 and get their $500 back later.
Also, you can deduct against your payments if you make business expenses. Need a new PC? You can deduct what you pay next filing.
Of what? I’m going to have a virtual office. I’ll have to stick it on my head.
You don’t really have to stick it anywhere to be honest. Haha.
It’s usually for stores.
BTW @SunWuKong, I can introduce you to my virtual office provider, she’s cheaper than other ones.
So, what I’m understand is that, in Taiwan, there no legal entity like a non-registered self-employed person dba My Name Widget Consulting, or independent contractor. You must be either a registered business or an employee.
And also no freelancers unless they register themselves as a business. That’s going to add extra problems because I would need to outsource some of the work.
AFAIK, legally. Yes. My CPA that I sent you can definitely answer that one for you.
Well… Freelancers are freelance employees. They still gotta pay their income taxes.
TF? So, if I wanted to hire one person to design one website one time and another to design the graphics, I’m now an employer of two people? And I have to deduct their income taxes and report or file or whatever that and health insurance and pay into their pension fund and have a big party and give them red envelopes at CNY?
The last one isn’t serious.
Or do you mean I would pay them for the work and they report it themselves as income?
Yes
Yes.
No.
Who doesn’t like parties?
I figured.
You still file payroll, but you can choose whether or not to deduct it now. They will have their reckoning come May.
Obviously, that will become an expense, lowering your net income and lowering your tax burden for yourself.
One thing to note, you’re not just hiring them. You’re also hiring YOU as well.
Ok, what if I hired a freelancer from abroad (as in they are living abroad at the time)? Like a guy from Sweden to build the website.
If I do need a freelancer in Taiwan to translate something, I suppose that changes the simple setup for a one-person business I was hoping for.
There’s got to be a simpler way to hire someone as a one-off worker. I remember there’s a website in Taiwan for finding freelancers. Something like upwork.com but for Taiwan. Maybe they were all registered businesses unto themselves, but it didn’t seem that way.
I don’t even want to understand that right now.
That one you should ask the CPA.
Yeah, I think I’ll need to hire a consultant before I start consulting.
Highly recommend calling mine. That way he lets me keep wasting time asking the same questions you are asking now. Then I impart the knowledge.
I wouldnt be able to answer all this without him. I am just several years into my company and now I know things.
You need to understand there are different rules for different company types. The small business types and.limited company types have very different rules, as does the higher corporation type. Taxes are different, as are basically everything past common sense.
Usually, most corporations own numerous small bussinesses to play the tax game .more efficiently. But that is insanely complicated and said conversations are better served offline.
Key points, but please read what was stated above…
You NEED a cpa to file 1 (ONE) step of paperwork. You are legally allowed to do everything else yourself. that is your right. If you dont know chinese, i suggest hiring a cpa for convenience, they are cheap and unless you scale up or are dealing in sensitive matters there is little risk. I know many people with companies that hire them for basic receipts/tax purposes. As a consultant, you can easily do it yourself. Thats on you. If you are selling/manufacturing loads of products, its a cost well worth paying! Lets use an average of 2k/month for cpa, plus their ultra retarded extra months fee (just up the price and use a 12 month cycle you mathematical rejects!). We paid 1800 for years. Then w switched to a taipei company and pay 2200 a month now.
Depends on industry. But basically they can sign a form that says xx paid for xx job. Essentially a sub contract. We do this daily, but we are in manufacturing and agriculture, so not sure if that works in your field. For us, we do this because farmers have extra allowance for not paying income tax. As with other raw materials industries. Basically buying a set amount of product for a price, not paying for services. If you get my drift. This is common in taiwan.
@Explant My Taiwanese girlfriend is in the process of setting up her own company here in Taiwan to sell things on Amazon. In her research she said that there will be a monthly cost to operating the business, Labor Insurance + National Health Insurance + Accounting fee, after the initial setup costs.
My question is, is Labor insurance necessary? And the NHI will just be an increase on what she is already paying as she has a jian bao ka
And I understand accountant won’t be necessary if she does taxes herself.
Just curious and wanted to clarify the matter of monthly running costs/expenses for a business. Back where I’m from there isn’t any of that requirement, it’s simply open a business and you can act as director without being employed so there is no associated monthly running costs.
If she didn’t ask for your help, then it’s probably best not to tell her how to run her business.
From what I know, everyone has to pay labor insurance (not sure the age range). I believe the Labor Insurance is the equivalent of Social Security in the US.
If she is not using her company to pay the Labor Insurance, she’s probably going to get a bill to pay for it every 2 months at home.
Same goes for health insurance. She probably wants to handle that through her company instead of getting a bill for it at home. I don’t believe NHI is free.
Better to have an accountant who is aware of the best way to handle the books than have a lay person with no specialized tax knowledge doing it.
Oh for sure, not telling her how to run her business, we are just doing the preliminary checks to see whether setting up a business is feasible for her situation.
I called an accountant to verify, as a sole owner/shareholder of a business, the only real requirement is NHI and the process would be to withdraw from paying it as an individual, and then re-applying for it via the company, and there will be a slight increase in premium due to different rates.
I was told labor Insurance is not necessary unless she is employing herself or others, nor is social pension/security, granted this is all for a sole owner/shareholder of a company that is Taiwanese, which seems to be in line with others I’ve spoken to that have setup companies through their Taiwanese partners, at least initially.
Note my experience is with limited company, not much else
NHI and jianbao ka are basically the same. Its just the card for health insurance. She, and you, need it regardless so its not a big deal.
Labor insurance will be an extra cost. You need it as the owner/operator of the company of one.
Accountant is actually only needed for 1 peice of paperwork. everything else you can do yourself. That is up to the company to decide whether its worth it or not. Cheap cpa are about 1500nt plus a month, they do that weird 13 month a year thing. Cheap ones should be fine for internet sales without much complexity. When we grew, we changed our cpa to a more professional company in taiwan. Pay 2200/month. For us the nearly 30k/year is worth the amount of time saved doing paperwork. But for some they like to do it themselves 
ther is no law stating you need one after that 1 thing during setup.
Setup is also ultra cheap if you are fluent in mandarin. We wont use accountants to open/modify businesses anymore as their fees are high and the process is fairly straight forward and easy. We paid 18,000 to start a ltd company trough accountant. 10,000 everytime we needed to hange registration (we have moved locations a couple times). Accountants up north charge considerably more that i have seen.
One more item on an accountant. Unless your a big company, many CPA use staff (non CPA) to do most of the work, so it can be done in house in most cases at the same standard (assume you have decent thinking staff). What made us change was not the cost, but dealing with the local tax office audits which found better dealing direct than with the CPA who did not know out business well and thus probally paid more tax than we needed to (the local district tax office we deal with has helpful staff helping the girl doing our bi monthly reports)
That’s for damn sure. I was toying with the idea of opening a branch office of my Japan company to help with exports/licenses and got a quote from a Taipei accountant for 50,000 to set it up.
Absolutely on both above posts. Thats why most companies of acertain size have their own.accountants then send the legal cpa get the pre organized data.
To be honest, we setup/adjust everything ourself now to avoid the cpa gouge. It really is worth reading through tr actual laws! They are almost all translated into english and available online. So one can get maybe a 80~90% idea on actual fact before discussing with accountants and/or government folks. we now use a well known company in Taipei.because we export more now and we enjoy the fake sense of security with them having at least basic common sense. And knowing, or knowing how to refference ,certain jey points we can talk with them like professionals. Rather than the usual uneducated type annoyances as @DKaoshuing mentioned. Its worth a few hundred nt a month more just to avoid headache painkillers.