International Client Services

There are a variety of legal forms of corporation in Germany such as

• GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung – Limited liability company)
• AG (Aktiengesellschaft – Stock corporation)

In most cases, especially foreign origin companies incorporate so called “GmbH" in Germany due to its readiness of incorporation process as well as ordinary operation. We support you in setting up your “GmbH” together with reliable German notary publics in English and Japanese language.

In Germany you may run your business without a local employee. However, you may have to secure an active address where you can receive official correspondence from relevant authorities. In this regard, we can provide our active address with office space for you and receive, forward and archive mails and correspondences on behalf of you.

Once you run your business in Germany, you are obliged to follow various compliance obligations particularly in terms of accounting and taxes. In order to focus on your main business you may easily come up with your realistic solution by outsourcing such compliances to us. We may support you with a full coverage of accounting and tax compliance backed by wealthy experiences with foreign origin companies. Typical services offered are as follows: 

• Monthly bookkeeping
• Monthly reporting package
• Yearly financial statement
• Publication of financial statement
• Filing VAT returns in Germany and other EU countries
• Filing VAT returns for B2C through an online or an internet business to EU member states (MOSS/ Mini One Stop Shop)
• Filing Corporate and trade tax returns 
• Payroll-run

Although VAT in Germany is not any cost for companies with the exception of a few exemption rules many companies pay substantial amounts of additional VAT as a result of periodical tax audits. Moreover, if you conduct  services and/or goods delivery among EU member states, you might face VAT registration obligations in other EU countries and you have to note specific wordings in your sales as well as received invoices. In these regards we support you by providing the following services:  

• Intensive review of all transactions
• Correction and / or suggestion of sales and received invoices (German domestic as well as EU deliveries and services)
• Diagnosis of your accounting or ERP system to adopt German VAT compliance
• Proposal of the latest archiving methodology to comply with German tax law

Basically it is not mandatory for employees in Germany to file an individual tax return as long as you have a single source of income as an employee. However, it could be obliged to file a return if you earned from more than one resource or could be favorable for most of expats to file a return to obtain refunds. In any case, we may support your tax individual filings based on our rich experiences to handle with foreign expat’s return.

It is widely known that inter-company pricing between affiliated companies must be on so-called “arm’s length price” basis from a corporate tax point of view. In case your company in Germany conducts cross-border transactions  among affiliated companies on a substantial scale you must submit a documentation stating facts, circumstances and arm’s length prices of those cross-border transactions in course of a tax audit.

We support this documentation which is subject to the latest OECD guideline in German and English.