It took me months to register a company in the Netherlands
My family life is complicated, and at the moment it looks like I am working hard to make it even more complicated, but I have the feeling that I am finally getting things under control. I live in the Sunderland in the north of England, but I recently went through the long, complicated process required to register a company in the Netherlands. That is not as crazy as it may sound. I run a roofing business, pretty successfully, with enough employees that it should continue to function without too much hands-on work from me. I chose to register a company in the Netherlands because:
- The level of tax is fantastic compared to Great Britain;
- There is plenty of demand for my skills in the strong Dutch economy;
- Most importantly, my wife is Dutch and we are moving over there in the next weeks.
I expect to continue to manage my current business running once I have immigrated, but I am not the type of person to be content with management at a distance. I am still young and want to be busy, working with my hands. To do that I had to register a company in the Netherlands and invest in a company big enough to cover the demand that I expect to encounter once I am there – I already have clients waiting. I speak fairly good Dutch and of course my wife is a native, so we decided that we could manage to register a company in the Netherlands on our own. That was a mistake.
Why it took me so long to register a company in the Netherlands
The process is well-organised and clear. The Dutch government really have perfected the process. For people who live in the Netherlands. For those of us outside moving in, it is a lot more difficult to register a company in the Netherlands. It is just a question of logistics, for example the Chamber of Commerce equivalent in the Netherlands, the Kamer van Koophandel, has offices all over the Netherlands. You need to go to these offices to get and submit most of the forms that you are going to need. Which is a challenge from Sunderland. My wife and I travel to Holland regularly, so we were able to go to the offices occasionally, but it still became time-consuming, particularly when we made mistakes on the forms and had to resubmit them. You must have a Dutch bank account to register a company in the Netherlands, which we expected to be easy because my wife holds a Dutch passport, but again we made mistakes along the way, attempting to open the wrong type of account and wasted several weeks once again. By this time the whole process was getting incredibly frustrating, almost to the point of giving up.
Getting help and speeding up the whole process
We realised eventually that we were making it much more difficult for ourselves to register a company in the Netherlands than it needed to be. So we enlisted help. We went to Intercompany Solutions, who are specialised in helping foreigners to register a company in the Netherlands. We found their website at intercompanysolutions.com while looking for basic advice and quickly hired them to register a company in the Netherlands for us. They finished the whole process in days, which amazed us after the months of effort and work that we had put into it and not got very far. So I have learned my lesson, trust in the experts.
