[atemerev]

The same story in Switzerland, perhaps even worse. Any company here generally requires a full-time administrator to handle the paperwork (and salaries here are huge). Or you can outsource it to the agency, but it will cost at least $10k/year, even for the smallest operations (cheaper than hiring a full-time administrator, however, agencies tend to miss things).

[alternize]

huh, where does your experience come from?

currently running two small swiss it companies (3 and 6 employees), and ran several more in the past. none had a "full-time administrator".

founding costs (notary, fees etc) were always around €2000 for GmbH and €5000 for AG. our yearly expense for an external accounting expert to do our end-of-year accounting and taxes is around 1k to 2k per company (i.e. 1 to 2 man-day).

[atemerev]

Which canton are you incorporated in? My experience is with the canton of Geneva, where I have made multiple beginner's mistakes.

[alternize]

sorry for the late reply. nidwalden and zurich... there was not much difference between the process in the two cantons. we had a lawyer and an accountant help us in the beginning to get the hard-to-figure-out things during incorporation right. money well spent!

[matt4077]

If you actually look at the meat of the article you'll notice that all it takes for the setup is about an afternoon with a notary and 500 Euros. Yearly expenses are mentioned by the author somewhere in this threat, and he says 2000 Euro pa, but note that they're talking about a business that must do at least 6-figures revenue (otherwise VAT reporting wouldn't be on a monthly basis). For a minimum shell company, you can easily get by with a few hundred, and the burdens scale at below O(n), so it never becomes economical to chose a different jurisdiction for for the administrative burdens.

[atemerev]

It's not expensive, but quite time-consuming. :(