How and why was created SOLAR STAFF
As we promised in the previous post, we tell in more detail about our service and how it was created.
Let's start from afar. Once upon a time there was a boutique law firm Seneschal International, which had long and fruitfully engaged in legal support for Internet business. Internet projects came across different, and each project had its own problem points, sometimes similar, sometimes completely different. But the most painful question for all the projects was the same: how is it legal and regularly paying a large number of individuals — webmasters, freelancers, speakers — for their work and services?
We began to think how to be. Naturally, the "black" schemes were not considered, since the task was to get rid of them; but it turned out that the legal options are not so simple. We had to give up the idea of ​​drawing up contracts for the contract almost immediately, why we told you in the last publication . In short: the documentation and reporting, plus the tax burden on social contributions, were beyond the marginality of services, and withholding personal income tax resulted in noncompetitiveness.
')
As an experiment, we offered a single advertising partner network (Mixmarket) to try to make their webmasters individual entrepreneurs. They began to write guides: how to register as an individual entrepreneur, how much it is more profitable for taxes, and the guys from Mixmarket under the loyalty program made a system of compensation for registration costs - but this did not help. Then we created an “auto fill-in” form for registration, wrote instructions on how to fill out and submit reports (“I haven’t had a case yet”), found many companies in the regions helping to register individual entrepreneurs, found accounting offices, agreed with all about substantial discounts . But even here the result was not very joyful, because the IEs were just a little more than 6% of webmasters.
Writing this experiment into the number of "non-working" options, we conducted surveys among services and realized that more than 10% of the total number of webmasters to "recruit" to the PI did not happen to anyone. Accordingly, we decided not to return to this method.
Then we began to study how Yandex lives with its affiliate network - for those times, using one of the Russian companies of the group as the CSC. But the idea of ​​CSCs also had to be abandoned at the stage of a theoretical model, since, apart from how to produce “dumpsters”, such a scheme of work could not lead to anything good (and legal).
Then we decided to explore the experience of Google. Since Google is not a Russian company at all, it pays its webmasters not from Russia. For this reason, such a company cannot be a tax agent of such individuals (according to the Tax Code of the Russian Federation), does not charge social contributions and does not hold personal income tax, shifting the burden of tax payment to the webmasters themselves. After reviewing Google’s work, we offered our “trust” Russian projects to enter the international market, dividing our services into the Russian part, which does not have business with individuals, and the foreign part, which will work with such individuals. For these purposes, we have found jurisdictions in which our Russian Internet business lives comfortably.
Again - no "black" options! We organized outlets to international markets for our clients in full compliance with all requirements of applicable laws: with opening offices in places of presence, hiring and / or relocation of part of the it infrastructure, personnel, localization of products, transfer of required business processes. So we "saved" a little more than ten of the largest Russian Internet projects. But even this option was not a panacea - although such a division of business covered the issue of payments to individuals, and companies no longer scared Russian and foreign investors with “strange” items of expenditure, but the requirements for the very possibility of such a restructuring were and remain, as they say, far from for all. Considerable temporary (at best, a year and a half) and financial (from 100 to 500 thousand USD) costs are completely unacceptable and very heavy for the overwhelming majority of Russian Internet companies.
Realizing that we were tired of restructuring another project from scratch and re-going through all these “circles of hell”, we came to the only correct conclusion - to serve the interests of a wide variety of Internet projects, both Russian and foreign, we need a single online service developed with a conscious approach to the problem. This is how the SOLAR STAFF appeared - a service that allows our counterparties to work with individuals according to the customer-general contractor model (SOLAR STAFF service) - a subcontractor (webmaster or freelancer), which in turn gives companies the opportunity to work with individuals without undue pressure on document flow and taxes, while not wasting time and money to truly become an international business.
But about what it was necessary to do in order for the SOLAR STAFF to work, we will tell in the next post.
Let's start from afar. Once upon a time there was a boutique law firm Seneschal International, which had long and fruitfully engaged in legal support for Internet business. Internet projects came across different, and each project had its own problem points, sometimes similar, sometimes completely different. But the most painful question for all the projects was the same: how is it legal and regularly paying a large number of individuals — webmasters, freelancers, speakers — for their work and services?
We began to think how to be. Naturally, the "black" schemes were not considered, since the task was to get rid of them; but it turned out that the legal options are not so simple. We had to give up the idea of ​​drawing up contracts for the contract almost immediately, why we told you in the last publication . In short: the documentation and reporting, plus the tax burden on social contributions, were beyond the marginality of services, and withholding personal income tax resulted in noncompetitiveness.
')
As an experiment, we offered a single advertising partner network (Mixmarket) to try to make their webmasters individual entrepreneurs. They began to write guides: how to register as an individual entrepreneur, how much it is more profitable for taxes, and the guys from Mixmarket under the loyalty program made a system of compensation for registration costs - but this did not help. Then we created an “auto fill-in” form for registration, wrote instructions on how to fill out and submit reports (“I haven’t had a case yet”), found many companies in the regions helping to register individual entrepreneurs, found accounting offices, agreed with all about substantial discounts . But even here the result was not very joyful, because the IEs were just a little more than 6% of webmasters.
Writing this experiment into the number of "non-working" options, we conducted surveys among services and realized that more than 10% of the total number of webmasters to "recruit" to the PI did not happen to anyone. Accordingly, we decided not to return to this method.
Then we began to study how Yandex lives with its affiliate network - for those times, using one of the Russian companies of the group as the CSC. But the idea of ​​CSCs also had to be abandoned at the stage of a theoretical model, since, apart from how to produce “dumpsters”, such a scheme of work could not lead to anything good (and legal).
Then we decided to explore the experience of Google. Since Google is not a Russian company at all, it pays its webmasters not from Russia. For this reason, such a company cannot be a tax agent of such individuals (according to the Tax Code of the Russian Federation), does not charge social contributions and does not hold personal income tax, shifting the burden of tax payment to the webmasters themselves. After reviewing Google’s work, we offered our “trust” Russian projects to enter the international market, dividing our services into the Russian part, which does not have business with individuals, and the foreign part, which will work with such individuals. For these purposes, we have found jurisdictions in which our Russian Internet business lives comfortably.
Again - no "black" options! We organized outlets to international markets for our clients in full compliance with all requirements of applicable laws: with opening offices in places of presence, hiring and / or relocation of part of the it infrastructure, personnel, localization of products, transfer of required business processes. So we "saved" a little more than ten of the largest Russian Internet projects. But even this option was not a panacea - although such a division of business covered the issue of payments to individuals, and companies no longer scared Russian and foreign investors with “strange” items of expenditure, but the requirements for the very possibility of such a restructuring were and remain, as they say, far from for all. Considerable temporary (at best, a year and a half) and financial (from 100 to 500 thousand USD) costs are completely unacceptable and very heavy for the overwhelming majority of Russian Internet companies.
Realizing that we were tired of restructuring another project from scratch and re-going through all these “circles of hell”, we came to the only correct conclusion - to serve the interests of a wide variety of Internet projects, both Russian and foreign, we need a single online service developed with a conscious approach to the problem. This is how the SOLAR STAFF appeared - a service that allows our counterparties to work with individuals according to the customer-general contractor model (SOLAR STAFF service) - a subcontractor (webmaster or freelancer), which in turn gives companies the opportunity to work with individuals without undue pressure on document flow and taxes, while not wasting time and money to truly become an international business.
But about what it was necessary to do in order for the SOLAR STAFF to work, we will tell in the next post.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/293204/
All Articles