Bookkeeper for your startup BV

A BV is a separate legal entity, and that's what drives the administration. The company itself pays tax on its profit, files its own returns and has to publish a set of annual accounts. You as founder are, in this respect, someone the company pays.

Concretely, five things recur for almost every startup BV:

• Corporate income tax (vennootschapsbelasting) on the company's profit, filed annually.
• Annual accounts filed with the KVK. Mandatory for every BV, regardless of revenue.
• VAT returns, usually quarterly, including nil returns in a quarter without turnover.
• Payroll taxes as soon as you have staff or pay yourself as director-shareholder.
• A proper administration, kept for at least seven years (longer for data on real estate).

Most of the year is fixed in advance, which is good news: it means it can be planned. This is the rhythm for a BV with a financial year equal to the calendar year.

• Monthly: payroll administration and the payroll tax return, if you have staff or a director-shareholder salary.
• Quarterly: the VAT return, filed and paid by the last day of the month following the quarter.
• Within five months of year-end: the corporate income tax return, unless you have an extension.
• Within twelve months of year-end: the annual accounts filed with the KVK at the latest.
• If you use WBSO: R&D hours recorded within ten working days, and the mandatory notification by 31 March.

If you work for your own BV and hold a substantial interest in it, the customary salary rule (gebruikelijkloonregeling) applies: the company has to pay you a salary. That means your BV becomes an employer, with a payroll administration, monthly payslips and a monthly payroll tax return, even if you're the only person on the payroll.

Which amount applies in your situation, and which exceptions or transitional rules there are, is a tax question. That's not our work: we run the payroll administration and file the returns, and you settle the amount with the Belastingdienst or a tax specialist.

Payroll always costs 20 euros per employee per month, payslips and the payroll tax return included, with no setup fee. That includes yourself as director-shareholder.

To make it concrete, here's what a month looks like for an early-stage BV with one person on the payroll, and what that means for your plan with us.

Being explicit about scope prevents surprises on both sides. This is what we handle for a BV, and what we deliberately leave to others.

• Continuous, daily-updated bookkeeping on an automated platform.
• VAT, payroll and corporate tax returns, filed on time.
• The full year-end close in the bookkeeping platform.
• A formal set of annual accounts and the KVK filing, as an optional add-on at an agreed fee.
• Payroll, always at 20 euros per employee per month.
• A real-time dashboard with your cash position, burn and runway, and reporting an investor can read.
• We don't advise: no strategic or financial advice, no tax planning or structuring, no valuations and no statutory audit. We make sure the figures underneath such a question are right, and we say so when it belongs with a specialist.

With us it's a fixed monthly fee per entity, based on your invoice volume: the number of sales and purchase invoices we process for you per month. Starter covers 0 to 75, Growth 76 to 125 and Scale 126 to 200 invoices per month. Bookkeeping, the returns, the full year-end close and the real-time dashboard are included.

Two things that are often a separate invoice elsewhere, and aren't here: onboarding and the migration of your current administration are part of your monthly fee, so there are no setup costs. And there's no time-and-materials billing, so a question doesn't cost you anything extra. A formal set of annual accounts is the one thing we quote separately, because not every startup needs one.

You can switch at any time, also mid-year. We run the migration in parallel with your current bookkeeper: we set up the platform, connect your bank accounts and tools and import your historical data, and only switch over once everything runs on our system. Your current bookkeeper keeps working until that moment, so no period is left uncovered.

A full switch takes five working days. What we need from you is limited: access to your current administration, your bank authorisations and a signature for the tax authority authorisations we file on your behalf.

Almost all of them come from the same root cause: a BV is a separate entity, and the administration hasn't been treated that way.

• Private payments from the business account. Every one of them creates a current-account position between you and your BV that has to be unravelled later.
• Deducting VAT on costs that are partly or wholly private, which surfaces at the next check.
• Skipping a nil VAT return in a quarter without revenue. The obligation to file doesn't depend on turnover.
• Forgetting the payroll administration for the director-shareholder salary, so a year of payroll returns has to be filed retroactively.
• Filing the annual accounts late. That's an economic offence, and in a bankruptcy a breach of the publication duty can count against a director as improper management.

If there's a personal holding above your operating BV, you have two administrations: each with its own returns and its own annual accounts, plus the flows between them (the management fee and the current account) that have to match on both sides. We wrote that out on its own page, because it's a different job from a single BV.