Can you cover running costs of website without registering as self-employed etc

Yes, you can set it up as a limited company. then your company only pays corporate tax on profits. But there are no profits, still you'll need to file a tax return though, but you wont be declaring anything as income unless the LTD pays you, which it wont. Your LTD can earn a million quid and bucket loads of profits, but still not pay you a penny and thats perfectly legit. So you wont need to declare as self employed either. LTD is a separate legal entity to you.

FionMc wrote: »

Yes, you can set it up as a limited company. then your company only pays corporate tax on profits. But there are no profits, still you'll need to file a tax return though, but you wont be declaring anything as income unless the LTD pays you, which it wont. Your LTD can earn a million quid and bucket loads of profits, but still not pay you a penny and thats perfectly legit. So you wont need to declare as self employed either. LTD is a separate legal entity to you.

If you are a director of a company you have to file a tax return regardless.
Setting up a company carries responsibility in terms of filing to revenue and CRO. And unless you are skilled in this area, it will cost money to engage an accountant.
If you hold onto profits by choosing to not making a distribution, then the company will have to pay a close company surcharge in addition to corporation tax

RedXIV wrote: »

Sorry to hijack this, but for people who are looking to start up, is this a case of just looking for "accountants for startups" on google and picking at random? Or would you recommend looking for local guys?

Like OP, I'm looking at an online service thats not going to make very much money but from experience I just want someone to do the heavy lifting to get me compliant (especially as I've a mortgage application coming up )

Prior to doing my own tax returns, I worked with loads of different auditors/accountants, from big boys like Baker Tilly to one man operations and I can safely say, I never met an accountant that didn't disappoint.

In my opinion, no two accountants will ever give the same answer to a question. One will say it's fine to do something, another will say you can't do that. So, I would say talk to three accountants, initial conversations should always be free.

Talk about you and your business, are you a risk taker or are you always looking to be safe. How each accountant reacts to you should determine whether you will be able to work with these people going forward.

Are you going to do the day to day bookkeeping/invoicing/credit control yourself or are you going to employ someone to do them? Do you want your accountant to do it? How much are they going to charge you to carry out these services and is it cheaper to employ someone part-time/full-time instead?

As a sole trader, I can tell you it takes about 20 minutes to file your year-end tax return. How much are your accountants going to charge you for that? I used to pay €400 + VAT (about €500). Are they worth the money? Not a chance!

So, thread carefully and always get a quote before asking them to do anything.

Good luck!

All this talk of registering companys is way off beam. The OP is asking about registering as self-employed, which is simply registering as a sole-trader with Revenue and perhaps registering a trading name with the CRO (E20, a once off transaction, totally possible to DIY).

The answer is: If profit (= total income minus costs) is less than €5000 per year, then you don't have to register as self-employed. Instead, you just use a Form 12 on MyAccount on the Revenue website to report the profit.

pinkypinky wrote: »

Getting an accountant to do this level of work is small money if you keep good records for them to use. It'll be worth the money to know it's done right, the ability to ask for advice & it's a legitimate business expense to put against tax.

It's not small money, if all you are looking at is enough to cover the cost of running the website: Basic website hosting is perhaps €200 per year. I've never heard of an accountant wanting less than €400 per year.

If you want to cover the cost of developing a fancier website, that's a whole different issue. You won't necessarily be able to copy Year 1 figures for Year 2's tax return, either, because (presumably) the development costs will be mostly in Year 1.

But if you're not looking to cover development costs, then the only wild-card is the amount of advertising revenue you get. If you have Google Adsense (by far the easiest way to do ads), and your website gets insanely popular, and is in a niche which makes good money on Adsense (some are far, far better than others), then you could find yourself with a lot of profit, ie well over 5k. In this case, an accountant (one who understands the business model) is definitely a good idea.

But if your traffic or ad-revenue is low, then an accountant is not needed.

If you want to avoid the risk of high advertising revenue, then one option is to sell advertising space directly to interested parties. Eg if 5 people pay $40 to show an ad on your website for 37 days, then you've made €200 revenue. If website hosting costs you €201, then you've made a loss of €1 for the year. No need to report anything.

But whatever you do, do keep good records so that if Revenue happen to audit you, you can easily show what happened.