Autoentrepreneur professions

[Will]

Peter - Judie is employed on a salaried basis by a local estate agency (which is, I know, not the norm, as most negotiators, particularly British-born, seem to be self employed on commission, but then she does a lot more than just negotiation, being responsible for many of the other aspects of running the business when her employer is not around). Her primary health assurance and carte vitale is through CPAM, just as you say, and although her autoentrepreneur business has not yet had to make a declaration, we are expecting the cotisations to be payable through RSI, not affecting her employee cotisations. She selected a caisse affiliated to RSI for health assurance from several offered during the AE application.

If the AE business represents your main activity, then I would expect the primary cover to be via RSI (or whatever agency collects the cotisations for your profession) rather than CPAM. However, if you are merely 'topping up' a pension income, for example, CPAM will be your primary health assurance provider so I would then expect this to remain so.

It seems as if you have received a stock answer, and whoever sent it has not entirely understood the question. So yes, we will have to wait and see.

 

[P-D de Rouffignac]

Thanks again, Will, for your - as always - considered reply. I'll keep you posted - Peter-D de R.

[MKT]

I have been reading all this autoentrepreneur stuff on here all morning and am still completley confused. Yesterday I read all the autoentrepreneur website. I still cant see whether I need to register for this or not and what the ramifications are. Im terrified that we arent going to be abel to continue to make enough to survive as it is, I dare not make anything worse.

Our income comes from three sources

1. renting out a gite

2. admin work I do from home for a Uk firm.

3. work my husband does under the CESU scheme (garden work/pool cleaning)

We pay tax on the first two under the regime micro bic, I declare the money received, take off the allowances and pay tax on the rest. The social charges - well i dont know how they work them out but they send us a bill which we pay. Regarding CPAM we pay CPAM de base 3 times a year. The third one come pre-filled in on the tax form.

If I do need to register, which of these 'businesses' do I register for? and for myself or my husband or both separately? And what on earth do I say the business is for, because they are three separate things. I mean we cant be the only ones who do a bit of whatever we can to try to make ends meet (the second two are because we arent making much from the first). Do i have to register at all?

We dont pay tax proffesionelle.... should we be? how much is that likely to be for heavens sake and on which business would it be due (the gite is in one department and the admin work is done from home in another dept) . None of them are registered anywhere except on the tax form and we have been doing the gite for the last 3 years, the admin work for one. The income from all three come to about euros 20k max.

Sorry about all the questions - I HAVE spent ages trying to find the answers myself before bothering you guys on here but am going round in circles. I would be grateful for any advice anyone can shed, even if its just who to ask or where to go next. Thank you.

[Will]

It sounds as if all your taxes and social security payments are taken care of already by your existing micro bic and CESU arrangements so you do not need to bother about the autoentrepreneur regime, which is designed to simplify starting a new business. Though I don't quite follow the bit about CPAM de base.

Some might say that you might be slightly better off financially changing from micro-bic to micro-social (which is a close relative of autoentrepreneur) for your admin work, but I frankly don't see it as being worth the bother unless you are having real difficulty in paying the demands. After all, if it works, don't try to fix it. As for taxe professionelle, it might or might not be payable on part of your work (or to be more precise the part of your premises that you use for your work - it sort of corresponds to business rates), but you should have received some sort of notification by now if you were considered liable for this tax.

 

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

MKT,

For a start, if you are already registered and paying cotisations as a Micro BIC then you can't register as an auto-entrepreneur. One of the basic rules is thjat if you're already registered you can't 'transfer'.

That said, you can change your cotisation regime to the new 'Micro-Social' simplified regime. Where a conventional Micro has certain minimum levels of cotisations the micro-social rule is that you declare your turnover every 3 months (monthly some time in the future) and pay based on that. The big slogan is 'No Turnover = No Charges'

The amount you pay for a conventional Micro BIC or Micro-Social (Services) will be almost exactly the same for a given level of turnover. At present if you earn €20,000 then they knock off half, leaving €10,000 and then charge about 45%, so you pay €4,500. With Micro-Social they don't knock anything off but the charges are about 22.5% so you still pay €4,500. (NB, these are rough figures from memory.)

If you've already been in Micro BIC for three years and your turnover is more than about €2-3,000 (not sure of the figures) then you probably won't gain from Micro-Social, because the payments should work out to about the same. However, if your turnover has reduced over the last couple of years it might be a different matter.

If you want to PM me I'll try to help you sort out your options, but I'm not an accountant.

[Panda]

Hi

I agree with all of the above and I too am lost on the CPAM de base,what's that about?  As far as the gite goes, is it registered as a professional business (or Micro non professional), do you pay cotisations on the income or just as a side line?  It's confusing unless none of the income is registered as professional ...

Why do you think you need to register as autoentre??

Panda

[MKT]

Oh thank you so much - it is such a releif if I dont have to register/change. Thank you for taking the time - I will try to answer the questions you have asked.

- CPAM de base - well, when we were first here we had the E form, then when that ran out we applied under criteria of residence as we were not yet open for business. They took us in that route but we didnt have to pay anything that first year as our total income was below the limit (we didnt have any income). When we started renting the house out we filled in the annual CPAM de base form telling them of our earnings and the first year of that they said still nothing to pay. Last year we earned a little more and they said there would be an amount to be paid to ursaaf trimestriallay. Ursaaf duly wrote and asked for it and we paid. I hope thats clear , and I hope we havent done anything wrong - I always told them what the money came from and how much. Most years I sent them a copy of my tax forms.

- re whether the business is registered, no it isnt, which has never sat all that easy with me. Before we opened I went to the Mairie (we dont live in the same department) and asked them who we needed to tell and what we needed to do and they said that if it was just rented out for a few weeks in summer we didnt have to do anything. The most weeks we have ever sold in a year is 10 and so I did nothing and thought myself lucky. At tax time I rang the tax office and asked them where to put it and they guided me through it via the micro bic (and told me what line to put it on etc). My insurance company knows its rented out too but apart from that nothing else official.

- re why I think I need to apply, well I must have misunderstood then. I have received a letter from (seems a bit complicated) three official bodies (ministry of economy, ministry of budget and another 3 line body to do with commerce, artisans and tourism) saying that (at least as I understand it) "you are today an entrepreneur and you work under the fiscal regime of a micro enterprise and the economy is being modernised and there are important measures for individual entrepreneur that we want to bring to your attention" . That sent me off in a tizzy reading the website and this thread where it seemed it was some sort of official registration that all businesses had to do. I have always been slightly worried that we werent registered anywhere and so I thought I had to.

I hasten to add, I am not looking to save any money on taxes, social charges, cpam or anything else - it all seems fair enough to me and we are earning so little now that with the current economic outlook I cant see it beign too onerous or even taxable if this goes on! I merely want to stay within the law and pay my dues and register where I have to be. I am not hiding anything, although I am slightly worried by references to paying Taxe Proffesionel - in the case of the admin work, well I am just sat at my PC doing it online but in respect of the rented house, the whole house is used. I am scared to go and ask them in case they hit me with a big bill - we are pretty hand to mouth at the moment.

 

thank you again for taking the time to read this and help. I mean if the upshot of this is nobody thinks I need bother about this, well, happy days!

 

 

[Clair]

[quote user="MKT"]I have received a letter from (seems a bit complicated) three official bodies (ministry of economy, ministry of budget and another 3 line body to do with commerce, artisans and tourism) saying that (at least as I understand it) "you are today an entrepreneur and you work under the fiscal regime of a micro enterprise and the economy is being modernised and there are important measures for individual entrepreneur that we want to bring to your attention".[/quote]

I have received the same letter in reference to the gite income which has so far been declared as supplementary income to my salaried income.

As my employer died last year, I find myself with the gite income as my main income, with a few CESU hours thrown in here and there, so I suppose I have to register as an AE.

I am still wondering if furnished property rental is classed as a "commercial activity" subject to 12% charges and 1% tax or if it comes under "business services" by the fact that the linen is supplied, making it subject to 21.3% charges and 2.2% tax...[8-)]

[Will]

Ah, more vital information to hand now... Could you actually be referring to CMU de base (for which you would have applied through CPAM)?

I will leave answering specific questions on that to the experts on French health issues, like Cooperlola.

Registering a gite business is another area where there are quite a lot of different interpretations. As far as I recall, you only have to register if it forms your major source of income, or if it is over a certain figure (to achieve which you would need several gites). Again, I will leave specifics to those who have actual experience.

The letters you received sound as if they are alerting you to the micro-social regime, under which you pay cotisations every three months (with a monthly option to follow) based on your actual turnover, rather than on an estimated turnover with adjustments made in subsequent years. This forms the basis of the latest version of the micro regime, i.e. the autoentrepreneur. It's up to you whether you change or not - you have until 31 March this year to decide. It's probably easier to deal with on a day to day basis, particularly with a declining turnover, but for an established business the benefits will probably be small.

And I repeat that, with an established business, if you were liable to taxe professionelle, you should have been notified by now (even if most micro businesses are let off paying initially you would still have been asked for figures). If you pay taxe d'habitation on your gite you should not pay taxe professionelle as well.

[MKT]

Sorry Will, yes that is what I mean, the CMU de base applied for throguh CPAM. Sorry if I caused confusion.

Thank you too for your words of comfort about the TP. Do i take it then that if they judge you liable they would contact you, rather than waiting for you to fill something in and take it to them/enroll somewhere? If so then it must be ok because I havent been contacted and have owned the house since 2002.

Like Clair, the gite is the largest portion of my income (although unlikly to be so this year) and yes Clair, I was wondering the same thing about what it falls under.

If I am supposed to register the gite where would I do so anyway?

Finally, regarding 'cotisations' I am not sure what that means exactly, I do not pay anything three monthly (except the CMU) and the social charges (things like CRG, CRDS,loads of initials, a big list which came to about EUR 1000 last year) were billed about November to be paid by year end. Are they the cotisations that we are talking about or is this something else to be paid? I dont think the thing I pay is estimated - they seem to work it out after having had my declaration de revenus and it seems to be based on our earnings from that. I thought everybody got this. Oh dear, I hope I am not muddled about that too.