I have a question pertaining to taxes in Germany (Oh, I can hear you all just groan).
My partner and I are trying to find out the best solution to how to set up our accounts upon game release. This depends on whether or not Apple is reporting our revenue to the Germany government, or if it’s up to each of us individually to declare our income for the period.
Case A:
We plan on splitting the profit, 50%/50%. If Apple doesn’t report anything, than we would simply empty a bank account set aside for our game only a monthly basis. We would divide the balance of the account between us, and then each of us would be response for his own taxes.
What we’re afraid of is if there is any reporting/recording prior to this divide, in which case we would be taxed prior to the division. We do plan on talking to a tax advisor, but we figured that it would be best to try to answer some things which even the advisor wouldn’t know (does Apple report, etc).
there’s a couple of things to remember:
The income you have is not only from Apple Inc. in Cupertino, the income is paid from seven Apple regions where one of them is US with money coming from Apple Inc Cupertino. European sales are sent to you by Apple SARL in Luxembourg for example. So you basically have to deal with several incomes at once.
So one of you (except you register a “company” type) has be be the contact person for Apple and is the one that gets the money transferred to. That means that each month you receive from all regions, assuming you made over 250 US$ net in each region, a payment from all Apple sales regions. What is deducted from that is that you have bank transfer costs, currency conversion costs and all that and it gets automatically deducted from your income (it is declared on the bank paper thingie you can get out of the cash machine, don’t know the term for it).
What you need to do is then split the rest between you guys according to your split rate. What comes then is that each of you has to declare that with your yearly income, or declare it as income if you’re a company type.
What you need to do else is to declare some papers that prevents Apple from withholding 30% tax for some regions, but Apple tells you about that in the setup section of itts.apple.com. For us germans for example we need to fill out these papers for the regions Japan and US.
What else comes into this if you register (like me) a company type: All the income from Apple is free of the german MwSt. or better free of the “Umsatzsteuer” as the contract you do is with US Apple and hence due to a tax law between US and Germany you don’t need to send any 19% of that money to the tax department.
We won’t be registering a company, a GbR, or anything like that. We’ll just have one of our accounts be the one which is connected to a joint bank account. We’ll split it, and do our own taxes individually.
I will check out that regional-withholding paperwork though. Would it matter that both of us are Americans, we just working in Germany?
Thank you though, the general questions have been answered and we’ll be able to move forward.
Well, you already have a GBR founded. By law a GBR is already founded if 2 people are aligned for the same idea / work on the same thing, regardless what you call it or not. So if you plan to do a game together and share profit, you already founded a GBR and, by law, should also get the tax stuff done as it should be by a GBR (my wife is tax accountant…)
Regarding the americans: Depends on where the money income is made. As you live in germany, the place IS germany and hence the taxes are here to be paid.
Good luck with your project and see you next time in the Schweinske for the next Unity user meeting in Hamburg.
Well, not entirely. Even with a GBR you have to declare it in your yearly tax stuff as income as a GBR is a company type of individuals. Oh well, that damn german tax stuff…
