RetireJapan

Anyone working with a tax accountant? Would you mind sharing how much you pay for their services? The current accountant that I found charges ¥200,000/year and ¥20,000/month minimum. I still have to pay for MoneyForward app and input all data, otherwise I have to pay extra.

Do these rates sound normal? It seems pricey for US standards. Especially because I'm not running a business with dozens of daily transactions. I just started my consulting business and may only get a few transactions per month.

Also, anyone who does taxes themselves or with the help of a Japanese friend, please feel free to chime in. Thanks!

My accountant charges between ¥100,000 and ¥150,000 depending on your situation. It's once a year and they give me surprisingly good service before I even paid.

I first contacted them when I started my freelance kojin-jigyo business, and they proposed to file the blue sheet something procedure 6 months before I would ever pay them. Every year I give them some excel sheets with my income / expenses and they work from there. I actually improved my format after the first year because I realized they must have been looking for information across different documents to make their calculations...

I still have to search a lot of info by myself as they don't suggest much from their side, only answer my questions. Like they don't have much answer to "how to lower my taxes?" but they would answer to "how much can I contribute to an Ideco?".

glimmer wrote: ↑Sun Mar 14, 2021 4:39 am anyone who does taxes themselves or with the help of a Japanese friend, please feel free to chime in. Thanks!

I do my own taxes, with a bit of help from Google Translate. If you are a one-man-band, it's not that tricky at all once you get the hang of it. And if it's only a few transactions a month, even easier. For me, I have one source of income that takes withholding tax. I have expenses that fall into a few of the categories. Then, health insurance, pension, earthquake insurance and from next year iDeCo. It's just a case of figuring out which boxes to put them in.

Certainly in Tokyo and I would imagine other areas, there are local groups that can help you do your blue form. A friend uses this service and pays about 2000-3000 yen a month. The local tax office told him about it. That could be your first port of call. Once they have helped you do your first one, you can use this as a template for following years, just popping your amounts in the same boxes. Or you could even just go to the tax office and get them to help you for free.

Good luck!

I agree with Gareth. This year I am doing the blue return for the first time, using a software package and a Japanese friend familiar with the basics. It does take time to figure out what box things should go in but is certainly manageable. If you don’t have a ‘suitable’ friend, a service like Gareth mentions would be a good option for you to learn how to do it.

Basically as a ‘sole trader’ the ‘hard’ work is keeping decent records of your income across all sources and allowable expenses. You have to do this anyway, whether you use an accountant or not. The software will also calculate percentages of electricity/telecommunications bills for example, so no complex calculations are required. The only reasons I can think of to use an accountant is if you earn enough that a few hours of your time is worth more than their fees, or if they are going to help you lower your taxes somehow.

seb wrote: ↑Mon Mar 15, 2021 12:47 am My accountant charges between ¥100,000 and ¥150,000 depending on your situation. It's once a year

Yes, that's what we pay as a company (godo kaisha). There's no monthly charge because we do our own bookkeeping, for now at least.

I greatly appreciate all the responses here. I will respond to those individually in a follow up post.

In the meantime, I mentioned my concern to the accountant about the high monthly costs which is ¥26,000 including MoneyForward (~¥6,000/month). Below was his response, DeepLed from Japanese. As always, your candid opinion is most appreciated!

We recommend a monthly advisory contract even in the beginning of business for the following reasons, and in principle we do not provide a service with only an annual closing fee (¥200,000).

• In the beginning of business, the handling of consumption tax is particularly complicated, and it is necessary to control it to avoid unexpected tax payments.

• If there are a lot of errors in processing during the period, and more man-hours are required than expected at the time of closing, additional fees will be required, and the fees may be more than the tax advisory contract.

• In particular, since your company is a non-profit general incorporated association, it is necessary to enter journal entries for each department according to the nature of the business, and it is desirable to have monthly accounting checks (especially in the case of cloud accounting, the initial introduction is important).

We are not specialists in social insurance, and it is difficult for us to handle the procedures on your behalf due to compliance issues, but we can guide you through the procedures when hiring employees.

In addition, the monthly fee of 20,000 yen (excluding tax) includes the following services in addition to the close examination of transaction details and follow-up on tax treatment, which we believe is reasonable considering the volume of transactions (including overseas expenditures) based on invoices and receipts for the fiscal year ending December 2020.

• Follow-up of accounting entries by department

• Follow-up for efficient and accurate accounting entries

• Timely provision of information by sending monthly newsletters

Beaglehound wrote: ↑Mon Mar 15, 2021 2:28 pm I agree with Gareth. This year I am doing the blue return for the first time, using a software package and a Japanese friend familiar with the basics. It does take time to figure out what box things should go in but is certainly manageable. If you don’t have a ‘suitable’ friend, a service like Gareth mentions would be a good option for you to learn how to do it.

Basically as a ‘sole trader’ the ‘hard’ work is keeping decent records of your income across all sources and allowable expenses. You have to do this anyway, whether you use an accountant or not. The software will also calculate percentages of electricity/telecommunications bills for example, so no complex calculations are required. The only reasons I can think of to use an accountant is if you earn enough that a few hours of your time is worth more than their fees, or if they are going to help you lower your taxes somehow.

This is great advice and I had a very similar experience when starting out. I didn't have a Japanese friend or anyone to help me, so I used the chat support that was included with the online software called "freee". They don't have help in English but are patient enough. When I first started doing the blue return, freee was a lot smaller and they were a lot more willing and available to help answer questions even at the lowest price points(used to be about 10,000yen a year) but they have since grown and the price points have moved up and you longer get easy access to chat support. If you consider using them it would be worth it to pay for the more premium service with more help available at first, then once you get the hang of it, go for the lower priced service.

Although I can now do the Japanese taxes myself, recently I got tired of it and was looking around at hiring an accountant and the first quote I received was 50,000, which doesn't include keeping your books-you still gotta do that. That 200,000 a year quote you received is definitely way too high! Maybe if you had employees and had to do salaries and insurance and all that or were selling lots of gadgets and had a lot of inventory to deal with, but in your situation, no way.

Good luck with it!

Hi ichiokuen, I'm in a similar situation and currently looking for a tax Accountant. Would you mind sharing the contact details of the accountant that quoted you 50'000? Seems like a good offer to me. Many thanks!

Shirudo wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 2:07 am Hi ichiokuen, I'm in a similar situation and currently looking for a tax Accountant. Would you mind sharing the contact details of the accountant that quoted you 50'000? Seems like a good offer to me. Many thanks!

Hi Shirudo,
I'm really sorry but I will not recommend that accountant to anyone, as he was very rude to me when I turned down his offer.

Oh I see. Well, I think in this case it's better that way. If you have found someone in the meantime, feel free to PM me. I have contacted a few this week, but still waiting for feedback from most of them.