[earcar]

> there are specialized lawyers that maintain a pool of freshly founded GmbH's for you to buy

It doesn't sound easy nor cheap to buy a company and change the company name.

UG & Co. KG has a couple of advantages and while it did add some money and time to the table, it doesn't change the story.

Notaries in the US are the price of a dinner. Many people have waited up to 6 months to receive their VAT ID from Berlin.

[eqvinox]

> from Berlin

That's your problem right there. If you live in Berlin, take the 2 hours and go to Hamburg or Leipzig before doing anything that needs a working bureaucracy.

[earcar]

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe there was an issue with the "place of effective management" or perhaps the company address not being in your federal state.

[eqvinox]

You probably would've needed to get an address there somehow, yes. There's services that do that for you, the non-shady ones being provided by lawyers and notaries.

[ed.: a tiny office in Leipzig is pretty cheap too, but you'd need to ensure mail doesn't pile up there unchecked.]

Unfortunately I'm not joking about this entire thing. Berlin's underfunded, overstressed bureaucracy is to be avoided like the plague.

[ed.2: to be clear, it'll still not be great. Just less bad.]

[ExpertAdvisor01]

You need to demonstrate real substance (such as actually managing/working from there e.g in your case Leipzig ) . If you can't prove real substance they will just shift it back to berlin and you could be also held liable for tax evasion (if there is a lower gewerbehebel )

[eqvinox]

It's perfectly fine if they - or you - shift it back to Berlin… after you're done with all the initial setup.

But also, yes, this is one of the reasons you can hire lawyer's offices to do this, they know how to spin it such that they're regarded as administrating the company in their location (which is arguably true at that point).

And just to note, there's the concept of "field offices" (Betriebsstätte) which would need to be set up. That does still involve Berlin bureaucracy, but only for a Gewerbeanmeldung.

(Really: ask a lawyer. I hope nobody is taking legal advice from a HN thread.)

[pjc50]

> It doesn't sound easy nor cheap to buy a company and change the company name.

Again this is very straightforward and routine in the UK: https://paramountformations.com/product-category/off-the-she... ; a similar experience to buying a domain and spinning up a website on it. In organizations like investment banks they will have shells ready to go in the way you would have kubernetes pods.

[weinzierl]

I don't think domestic invoices should be reissued once the VAT ID arrives.

So, the story is really that it takes a couple of weeks for a freshly founded company to be ready to invoice customers outside of Germany, which I agree, is a sad state.

[weird-eye-issue]

They never said cheap, they said quickly.