[robert_foss]

Having founded a company in Germany, I would never under any circumstances do it again.

Notaries should not exist, and could be replaced by a simple website.

It's all incredibly tedious and slow, and there are lots of reoccurring work and fees. Closing a company takes 2-3 years too, even if there are no irregularities.

[Propelloni]

I'm not doubting your experience but mine is different. I'm doing business in the Köln/Düsseldorf area and while the experience could be nicer, it is far from terrible. I have been involved in founding five companies (four GmbH and one GmbH & Co. KG) and closing one down in the last 10 years and I would have no qualms to go for another one. Each founding took about 6-8 weeks from first filing to entry into the registry. Getting a VAT ID can take a few weeks longer -- or in one case months longer -- but you can do business with your normal company tax ID and sort it out at the end of the year. If you are really in a hurry, buy a shell company for a few grands plus corpus and you can be running within a week or two. Notaries are really helpful in that case.

From my point of view there are also not many fees and none of them are recurring. IIRC, you have to pay the notary, the registry and the tax office for services rendered. Once you are registered, there are other fees, e.g. IHK (trade association) membership or insurances, but that is not part of the registration, that is cost of doing business.

Liquidation on the other hand takes 12 month (a transitory period required by law) and a few weeks before and after the liquidation for notary appointments. That's it. All in all it took maybe 18 month from decision point to deletion from the registry and the main part of the extra 6 month was deliberation what needed to be done before the transition started.

[data_maan]

Can you recommend any company in that area that offers these services to buy a "ready to run" shell company?

[mtmail]

We got ours from https://www.foris.com/en/shelf-companies/ and can recommend them.

[Propelloni]

Notaries often have a list of available shells and can set you up quickly. That's what we did, so talk to your notary. Another way is to use a specialized service like [1].

The relevant keywords for research are "Vorratsgesellschaft" or "Mantelgesellschaft". The former are empty companies with no business activity, the latter are older companies with business history but inactive now. Mantelgesellschaften are nice because they bring a credit history along making stuff like leasing easier but cause a little bit more effort at time of purchase.

[1] https://vorratsgesellschaften.dnotv.de/

[TillE]

Germany loves endless bureaucratic paperwork which absolutely must be done in person (and good luck getting an appointment in Berlin), despite the many years of bleating about Digitalisierung which has apparently amounted to nothing.

[robert_foss]

From what I heard the cut the public funding for Digitalization by 90% last year. It truly is like going into a a -20yr time machine living here.

Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!

[PurpleRamen]

> From what I heard the cut the public funding for Digitalization by 90% last year.

This is basically wrong. They moved the budgets to different departments, where it made more sense. And it actually does move on..slowly. It's basically a living example of too many technical debts and the pains of federalism gone wrong.

> Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!

Real credit cards are very uncommon in Germany. Debit cards on the other hand are working well everywhere, even in small shops (since the pandemia to be fair).

[ivan_gammel]

> Debit cards on the other hand are working well everywhere

Not yet. There still exist plenty of cash-only places. In my neighborhood (P-Berg, Berlin) both nearest restaurant and nearest coffee shop are cash-only.

[mk89]

> Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!

Not sure where you people live, but this myth has to stop, eventually. I can literally count on one hand the n. of shops NOT accepting cards - it's most of the times shops which, I guess, use cash to have flexibility in their accountings :)

[ricc]

“Accepting cards” is not the same as “accepting credit cards” though… A lot of them only accept girocards and not credit cards…

[rglullis]

And credit cards in Germany are not "credit" cards as well. At least the one I got from Sparkasse does not let you hold a balance and must be paid in full every month.

[ricc]

Not sure about those, but I got mine around 2-3 years ago from gebührenfrei.de, which is from Advanzia Bank. Seems fine so far…with a minor disclaimer that I don’t really use it much. :-)

[mk89]

I don't have enough experience to speak about CC in Germany, but I don't see why a Rewe or ... boh, Aldi, Mcdonalds, etc should prevent that. I am a bit surprised, to be honest.

[avar]

Because there's a significant a transaction fee if you're paying by credit card, with cash or debit card there's no transaction fee.

The bigger mystery is why stores in some other countries are happy to have a payment method chosen by the customer eat into their profit.

[ricc]

Big chains and enterprises, for sure. But there’s still a lot of SMBs not accepting credit cards.

[PurpleRamen]

Debitcards, not girocards. I have no girocard since years, and still can easily pay everywhere. But to be fair, the pandemia really pushed this even the small shops.

[addandsubtract]

Ämter only take girocards or cash.

[jmb99]

Admittedly, this was almost a year ago. I found I could pay with credit cards in Berlin, but once I was in smaller areas I was looked at like I was insane if I tried to pay by anything other than cash. Probably didn’t help that my German was terrible.

In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.

Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.

[lttlrck]

I moved from the UK to Germany in 1996 and back then the banking & payment was just sooo backwards. Some stores were incredibly anachronistic (Lerche springs to mind - since closed down)

Sorry to hear it's still the same.

[mk89]

Germany and "digital" payments have a history due to old reasons.

We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.

[Rinzler89]

N'ah mate, the main reason is tax fraud, not trust in data holding entities, otherwise nobody in Germany would use Google/Instagram/TikTok if they cared so much about their data privacy.

Being free to dodge the tax man is incredibly valuable for small business and individuals in Germany as a lot of wealth is built on tax fraud. That's the kind of privacy people mean.

[mk89]

This looks like the typical black or white view about things.

Germany has 80+ million people. Having nobody on Instagram/Tiktok would be unthinkable.

However, historically speaking, this hesitation to have privacy over "convenience" is implemented still everywhere.

You can't just minimize it with "people want to evade tax", although it's also true.

[aleph_minus_one]

> N'ah mate, the main reason is tax fraud, not trust in data holding entities, otherwise nobody in Germany would use Google/Instagram/TikTok if they cared so much about their data privacy.

The people who are very vocal about (data) privacy in Germany (which are quite some people, though not all) indeed typically try to avoid such services.

[aleph_minus_one]

> We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

Exactly.

This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 35 years ago (many of its crimes still have not been prosecuted). There still exist lots of contemporary witnesses who can tell you what being potentially be surveilled means in the day-to-day life.

[mk89]

I heard of people being sent ... far away ... just because of jealous neighbors spying on you.

That's some level of f** up.

No wonder that cash is the only accepted payment method in a world that tries at all costs to sneak into your private stuff.

[fabianholzer]

> This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 25 years ago

In comparison to the NSDAP and SED, I think calling the 15 years of CDU government under Helmut Kohl (which actually ended a bit over 25 years ago) a dictatorship is a bit too harsh... /s

[run414]

Didn't Germany have 3 dictatorships in the 20th century?

East Germany (ended in 1990), Third Reich (ended in 1945), German Monarchy (ended in 1918)

[data_maan]

Don't mix cash with digitization. Japan is even more cash.bases than Germany, yet I'd say more advanced in terms of digitization.

[samus]

Aren't they still faxing documents all over the place? (AFAIK, you might have to do that from time to time in Germany as well)

[jeffreygoesto]

This one [0]? Legend, flipping through the records there was a dream come true for some years. But Vinyl shops world-wide had to close, but only this.

[0] https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.stuttgart-album-zu...

[ricc]

Digitalisierung means one receives a PDF form via email that he should print out, fill out, scan, and then email back again. X-D

[DyslexicAtheist]

surely you meant "... and then fax back again. X-D"

?

[pgeorgi]

> and good luck getting an appointment in Berlin

It's our failed state, so what do you expect?

[tnolet]

Founded companie(s) to in NL and DE. It's not so much that there is a notary step, it's just that the DE notary is slow, expensive etc. In NL it takes 30 minutes at a notary (or online) and typically EUR 125 or so. Done.

[khaomungai]

Where would you do it then instead?

[AndroTux]

Estonia, like stated in the article. As a German founder living in Estonia, I can confirm that the difference in complexity when it comes to founding a company, filing taxes and dealing with bureaucracy isn’t even comparable.

[artemonster]

do you know how in such cases salaries works? i.e. founder and employees are german and the company is in Estonia. Do they work as contractors? I thought to be a normal salaried employee you had to have the company also registered in germany too.

[AndroTux]

No, you don’t necessarily. Estonia has an e-Residency program targeted exactly at this scenario: Having a company in Estonia but living abroad. However, Germany being Germany, you will still have to deal with the Finanzamt and all the nice stuff that comes with it. So while you can run an Estonian company from Germany and be employed by it, I doubt you will gain much freedom from it. There’s really no escaping German bureaucracy without leaving the country.

[miohtama]

In theory, it should be possible for any EU citizen to work in any EU country.

In practice, it is not possible because you need to register to a local tax office of the worker. Spanish employee -> need to register your company with the Spanish tax office.

Good luck unless you can afford expensive legal services that do this for you. Does not make a sense unless you are planning to hire in quantity (>20 workers).

The alternative is that every remote worker is a subcontractor and takes care of their own taxes.

[formerly_proven]

> The alternative is that every remote worker is a subcontractor and takes care of their own taxes.

In Germany the pension insurance (DRV) will come around after a few years and demand a six digit figure from both your company and the employee, plus interest. You can also end up with criminal charges filed against you.

[ascorbic]

In the UK it can all be done online. It costs £12 and the form takes about ten minutes to complete. You'll get your registration within 12 hours. The only complicated bit is if you don't want your home address to be public record and you don't have a physical office you'll need to sign up for a mailing address somewhere. Of course Brexit makes the whole thing less appealing than it used to be.