Постоянният бизнес обект, или бизнес клон, във данъчен смисъл в Германия, е фиксиран бизнес обект с правомощия на разпореждане на дружеството, в който стопанската дейност се извършва изцяло или отчасти. Дейности, които са предназначени за целта на компанията, като ИТ дейности (програмиране, разработка на приложения), се считат за бизнес дейности. Не са включени дейности от подготвителен характер или спомагателни дейности (например административни дейности). Съгласно Типовото споразумение на ОИСР от 2017 г. за (необвързващо) тълкуване на споразуменията за двойно данъчно облагане, постоянен бизнес обект в домашния офис на служителя може да съществува под формата на фиксиран бизнес обект, ако домашният офис се използва редовно и постоянно от служителя за стопанска дейност и дейността се извършва в домашния офис по искане на работодателя. В такива случаи може да се приеме, че домашният офис на служителя е на разположение на компанията и че тя има правомощията за разпореждане, необходими за постоянния бизнес обект. Ако обаче е възможно служителят да използва работно място в компанията, работодателят няма право да разполага с домашния офис, дори ако голяма част от работата се извършва в домашния офис на служителя. As questions about working with Xero in Germany keep coming in, and our time is limited, I will try to give a short outline of the procedure.
Accounting consists - in general terms - of 3 big components: bookkeeping, preparation of the final accounts, and preparation of all tax declarations for the year in question. On the other hand, broadly defined, accounting is the translation of tax law into numbers. Do not undervalue the principles of tax law, they are a crucial part of the accounting! Xero is still not certified for Germany, and this is not just a formality. It means that, at least at present, Xero is unable to apply the German tax law for you, so if you want to use Xero, you would have to perform this task by yourself, outside of Xero. In Deutschland sind strenge Vorschriften an eine ordnungsgemäße Rechnung für Lieferungen zwischen Unternehmen innerhalb und außerhalb der Europäischen Union für den Vorsteuerabzug gegeben.
Folgende Bestandteile müssen in einer nach dem Umsatzsteuergesetz ordnungsgemäßen Rechnung enthalten sein: 1. Name und Anschrift des leistenden Unternehmers 2. Name und Anschrift seines Kunden / Rechnungsempfängers 3. die Steuernummer oder die Umsatzsteueridentifikationsnummer des leistenden Unternehmers 4. das Ausstellungsdatum der Rechnung 5. eine fortlaufende Rechnungsnummer 6. die Beschreibung der gelieferten Ware oder der erbrachten Leistung 7. der Zeitpunkt der Lieferung oder Leistung HIER EINE BEISPIEL-RECHNUNG: After a year of working with Xero - and on account of frequent inquiries - we summarize:
The problem: XERO is not certified for the German market This means that accounting and financial statements can not be fully prepared in Xero and then submitted to the German tax office. Xero data and evaluations do not meet the German standards for generally accepted accounting principles. Xero data can not be transferred over an ELSTER interface (Elektronische Steuererklärung = electronic tax return) to the German tax authorities the data. For profit assessments according to § 4 para. 3 EStG as well as for balance sheets, however, is the digital submission to the tax office via ELSTER mandatory. Moreover, in Xero the distinction between German commercial law and German tax law not implemented. Numerous tax regulations often lead to differences in the commercial and tax balance sheet. While the annual tax balance sheet is to be provided for the tax office, is the annual financial statement (based on German commercial law) necessary for the mandatory disclosure in the trade register. Xero has no GDPDU API. In the practice, the German tax authorities will want to access electronically, in the case of a tax audit, all financial data of your company. Therefore, the data must be necessarily submitted in the GDPDU standard to the tax auditors, a data format which the tax authorities in Germany use to evaluate all financial data. In the case of a tax audit, all documents of the company must be made available to the tax office. Although Xero offers the possibility for incoming and outgoing invoices to be stored to each record of the bookkeeping, you can not currently download all records of the year, quarter, or month at a time, but you would have to export each individual document painstakingly out of Xero. We have already discussed this with Xero. If and when a solution to this problem would come, nobody knows. Xero does not provide interfaces to German accounting software. The sole import of account balance numbers into DATEV or other German systems would not be sufficient for the preparation of financial statements. With the account balance numbers from Xero it would be possible to create the advance turnover tax notification (VAT) and the ZM (recapitulative statement for deliveries and services in the EU) and then to transmit the data via ELSTER to the tax authorities, but to all other purposes Xero bookkeeping will be more likely to fail. Xero has no direct online access to German banks at present. The data of German banks has to be imported via CSV files in Xero. There are difficulties, too, when Xero cooperates with other financial systems, like Receipt Bank, Transferwise, Paymill, GoCardless, etc., since currently only some of them are connected via interfaces to each other. The invoicing in Xero could become in future also problematic. It is to be expected that the tax office – and all other authorities – in Germany would enforce for invoices and other digital documents from 2018 on a special file standard (ZUGFeRD). It remains to be seen whether Xero would also adopt this standard or not. The solution: Xero in combination with a German financial accounting software For our clients who work with XERO, we make the Xero bookkeeping and parallel to it the German bookkeeping at the same time. To save time and cost, we proceed as follows:
Some of our clients prefer to do the bookkeeping in Xero on their own. As we cannot use the Xero data for the German bookkeeping because it is not reliable, we take the original bank and petty cash transactions of the client and conduct the bookkeeping in our system as presented above. We then still need to examine all financial documents, always in a digital form. Summary: At present, Xero alone is not to be used as an accounting system in Germany. Auxiliary constructions with the bookkeeping in Xero and evaluations and transmissions of account balance numbers etc. are not a viable option. Only an accounting in accordance to the German accounting standards can meet the requirements of acceptance by the tax authorities in Germany. |
FRANK LEHMANNMBA for Finance and Financial Services (UK), Steuerfachwirt (GER) Categories
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