We went to see the company accountant yesterday – always a pleasure as you can well imagine. In fact they are very pleasant, but it’s still not really a highlight of the month.
A typical meeting with the accountant involves us asking over and over if there are any expenses we have overlooked, in a sad and transparent attempt to reduce our taxable profits, while they keep telling us about unexpected taxes, and the need to keep triplicate copies of all paperwork until the next millennium.
They then point out that even if we pay enormous and compulsory pension contributions for the next decade or so we probably still won’t actually get a pension. The good news is that yes, we should one day get a VAT rebate, but it will probably be our children who benefit because we will be six feet under at that remote future date.
We then had a little chat about company cars.
I asked if it was more sensible for us to buy a car ourselves, or for the company to buy one. They explained that it is often sensible for the company to buy the car, but usually only if it is a two seater commercial vehicle.
I’d seen this mentioned in our book ‘How to Run a Company in France Without Giving Every Last Penny to the Tax Authorities’, which is why I’d asked the question. But a small white transit van being no use to us, I had put it out of my mind.
What I had failed to grasp is that if you take a perfectly normal car, a 5 door Renault Megane for example, and throw out the back seats, you have a ‘two seater commercial vehicle’. And that is exactly what they sell in France – for company car purposes only, since no normal person would ever want one.
You can buy cars from all the leading manufacturers that look completely normal on the outside, and have back doors as usual, buy just don’t have any rear seats. Strangely the accountant didn’t think this strange, since it allowed lots of equipment, sales samples, brochures, etc to be carried in the car, and it turned out she had a popular ‘two seater company car’ herself.
Am I alone in thinking this is a strange idea? Or perhaps it is also possible to buy car seats separately, and pop them in the car when you are sure the tax man isn’t about to come calling?
Funnily enough we have just taken ownership of a two-seater Renault Kangoo van for precisely this reason: we make enough short, solitary work trips to make this worthwhile.
Oops, so when I said ‘no normal person would ever want one’ that was a bit rude then.
Our driving usually consists of taking the children and associated friends long distances to meet other scary looking youth. Then returning a few hours later to pick them up again.
I think we de do this ‘ferrying around’ much more than local French parents because we have a teeny sense of guilt for dragging them here to live in a quiet rural community where very little happens, while their friends in the UK tell them all about the parties, shopping and impressive holidays they get up to.