Tax & obligations — invisible compliance
Your obligations and your notices are ours.
Included in your monthly fee, never itemised, and happening without you noticing.
A Spanish subsidiary generates a steady stream of filings, deadlines and official letters, most of them in Spanish, several of them with consequences that begin before anyone has read them. None of it needs your attention. All of it needs someone’s.
The whole calendar of a Spanish subsidiary.
Every item below is a filing someone has to remember, prepare and submit on time. That someone is us. This is the standard set — yours may be shorter or longer, and we map it exactly in your first month.
- Modelo 303 — VAT return (IVA)
- Modelo 349 — recapitulative statement of intra-EU supplies and acquisitions
- Modelo 111 — withholdings on employment and professional income
- Modelo 115 — withholdings on property rent, where you lease premises
- Modelo 202 — instalment payments on account of corporate income tax
- Modelo 216 — withholdings on payments to non-residents
- Intrastat, once your goods movements pass the threshold
- SII, near real-time VAT reporting, once turnover passes €6,010,121.04
- Modelo 200 — corporate income tax return (Impuesto sobre Sociedades)
- Modelo 390 — annual VAT summary
- Modelo 190 and 180 — annual summaries of withholdings
- Modelo 296 — annual summary of non-resident withholdings
- Modelo 232 — related-party transactions, which almost every subsidiary of a foreign parent has; the filing and its basic documentation are inside the fee
- Modelo 347 — annual statement of transactions with third parties
- Annual accounts, formulated, approved and deposited at the Commercial Registry
- Accounting books, legalised at the Registry
- Changes to your tax profile, registrations and deregistrations
- EU VAT registration (ROI/VIES), and the inspection visit it can trigger
- Non-resident tax on payments leaving Spain
- Every notice from the tax authority, read and explained: what it is, what it asks, and by when. Inside the fee
- Routine information requests, answered from data we already hold. Inside the fee
- Substantive requests, inspections and appeals, quoted before we start
Visible in your portal as a calendar with dates and status, so that “it’s handled” is something you can see rather than something you’re told.
The piece that changes everything
Administrative custody.
For a company whose decision-makers are in another country, this is the single most valuable thing — and the thing most foreign subsidiaries discover they were missing at the worst possible moment.
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Power of attorney before the tax authority
We are formally appointed to receive your notices, so they arrive with us rather than in an inbox nobody in Spain reads. Spanish tax notices are electronic and they are in Spanish.
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Digital certificate, held and reissued
Nothing can be filed, signed or accessed without it. It expires every two years and it cannot be renewed — a new one has to be issued. We hold yours, we track the expiry, and we reissue before it lapses rather than after your filing has already failed.
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Mailbox checked every day
Every client’s official mailbox, every working day. Not weekly, not when something is due. The point of watching daily is that the response window on some requirements is short enough that a week’s delay has already spent most of it.
All of it is the reason nothing reaches you as an emergency.
If anything is filed late through our fault, we pay the surcharge and the penalty.
Late filing in Spain carries surcharges that escalate with delay, and formal penalties on top where a return was required and missed. If the delay is ours, so is the cost. That is not generosity, it is the only honest way to sell a service whose entire promise is that deadlines are met.
We guarantee only what we control. Never the bank, the tax authority or the Registry.
With or without bookkeeping.
A manufacturer with a full production cycle keeps its accounting in-house, because the numbers and the operation are the same thing. A group running SAP, Dynamics or Sage X3 wants its Spanish subsidiary inside the group system, not alongside it. Both are right, and neither should be forced to buy a service they don’t need in order to get the ones they do.
Full
We keep your books to the Spanish chart of accounts and convert to your group’s format.
Tax & Employment
Your team or your group system handles the bookkeeping and we take everything else: the calendar, the notices, the people and the HQ pack, with deviation alerts from read access to your accounts. Annual accounts are included, provided your team closes the Spanish ledger by the end of March.
One condition on the second: we ask for read-only access to your numbers. Not to duplicate the work, but because without data there is no watching, and without watching there is no anticipation. Everything this firm promises depends on seeing the numbers as they move.
See both configurations →Bank reconciliation, daily. Not at month end.
The standard way this is done is to request statements after the month has closed, match what can be matched, chase the rest with a long list of missing documents, and park whatever is left in a suspense account. By then the client no longer remembers the payment, and the accounts have stopped describing the business.
With read access to your accounts we reconcile daily, which turns a month-end list into a next-day question. It is a small difference in process and a complete difference in what your accounts are worth.
“Yesterday we saw a payment of €4,200 — can you send us the invoice?”
At each month end, one report, written to be read rather than interpreted:
- How income and costs moved against previous months
- Any extraordinary expense we spotted
- Receivables, with a flag if late payment is climbing
- Debt and amortisation
- And anything we noticed that you should decide about
Generated from your data by our own system, then read and signed off by the person who knows your business before it reaches you.
What your head office needs, in the format it already uses.
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Reporting
Spanish statutory accounts follow the Plan General Contable, which differs from both US GAAP and IFRS in ways that matter at consolidation. We keep the statutory books correctly and give your parent the figures in its own format and on its own reporting calendar. Where your group runs SAP, Dynamics or Sage, we work inside your system rather than sending a spreadsheet for someone else to rekey. Not sure your current reporting does this? Here is what evidence should reach HQ.
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Related-party transactions
Almost every foreign-owned subsidiary charges or is charged by its parent — management fees, intercompany loans, product at a margin, shared services. These have to be documented and reported (Modelo 232), and they have to be defensible. The filing and its basic documentation are inside the fee, kept current as the arrangement changes. A full transfer pricing study with comparables is referred to a specialist firm, briefed on your file.
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Repatriating profit
Dividends, interest and royalties leaving Spain carry withholding, and how much depends on the structure, the treaty and whether the EU parent-subsidiary regime applies. This is worth deciding before the money moves rather than reclaiming afterwards, and it’s one of the first conversations we have with a new subsidiary.
We work inside the system your group already uses.
Where your parent runs SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Sage X3, we work there and report on your close calendar. Real-time visibility for your head office, not spreadsheets emailed back and forth for somebody to rekey.
What’s coming
VeriFactu, and what it means for a foreign parent.
Spain is moving to certified invoicing software. Invoicing systems will have to produce records that cannot be altered without trace, with the obligation reaching corporate income tax payers on 1 January 2027 and everyone else on 1 July 2027.
For a foreign group the practical question is not the deadline but the system: whether the tool your parent invoices from can produce compliant Spanish records, and what happens if it can’t. We assess that for every client well ahead of the date, because the answer sometimes involves changing how the group invoices in Spain, and that is not a decision to make in the last quarter before it bites.
What’s in your fee, and what isn’t.
Most Spanish firms bill compliance by the item: a fee per return, a fee per annual account, a fee whenever something unusual happens. It produces a bill you can’t predict and an advisor with a quiet incentive to find more items.
We do it the other way round. Before you sign anything we map every obligation your company actually has — what you file, how often, and what your parent needs back. That map is what your monthly fee is priced against, and you get a copy of it.
Everything on that map is inside the fee. However many filings fall in a given quarter, the invoice is the same, and asking us a question is never a chargeable event.
Your fee changes when your obligations change. Not because a quarter was busy. If you cross into monthly VAT reporting, take on a new tax registration, add an entity or move to a filing profile you didn’t have before, we tell you what that does to the fee and when — before it happens, and in writing.
And work that isn’t compliance at all — a restructuring, an inspection, a change of shareholders — is quoted in writing before anyone starts.
What has a separate quote, and why.
- Tax inspections, formal submissions and appeals
- Restructurings: capital, shareholders, a new entity
- Catch-up on anything overdue when you arrived
- Personal tax for founders and directors
These are quoted in writing, with a scope, before anything begins. They sit outside because they are genuine projects, not because we found a way to bill for something that should have been included.
Customs, litigation outside the employment and administrative courts, and full transfer pricing studies with comparables go to firms we work with regularly, who send clients back to us. You get a briefed introduction, not a redirection.
Ask us what you’re currently missing.
If you already have a Spanish subsidiary, the fastest way to judge us is to let us look at it. We review the compliance position, score what we find by risk and by euros, and give you a report in English you can hand to your board as it is. If you move to us, its cost comes off your fee at 25% of each invoice until it is used up.