Déclaration de Chiffre D'Affaires: 79% or Full Amount?

Hello!

I have a little Etsy shop selling brocante and my sales are very tiny, but I am concerned that I have been filling out my RSI forms incorrectly. Understandably, other Etsy shop owners have been reluctant to reply to my pleas for help, presumably because they don’t know the answers either!

As I understand it, all my costs - including postage fees, which are paid by the customer - are included in my figures: I cannot make any deductions for expenses as they included in the 71% of my gross earnings that I am allowed to keep. I am then taxed on the remaining 29%.

I am about to fill in my first déclaration online after having sent paper copies up till now, and I really just need someone to clarify for me please that I am doing things correctly.

In the box for ‘ventes de marchandises’, do I write my whole earnings for the period, or do I work out 29% of that figure and then use that amount to work out the tax owed?

Thanks in advance!
Chloe

Hello Chloe,

I am a “Micro Bic” and have got a chambres d’hotes. As I cannot deduct anything either, I give the total amount and the tax people will deduct the 71% in my case, and I then pay tax on the rest.
Hope that has helped.
Regards Gitte

This isn’t quite an answer but you might like to know about the ability under the microentreprise régime to charge your “frais de débours” directly to your client without it being counted as part of your turnover.

The example mentioned in this example is about charging a client for postage on an item bought, restored & then sold on the internet.

Put simply if you are not making any money on the transaction (i.e. charging the client precisely what it cost you) then the taxman (rightly) doesn’t get a look in. The article doesn’t mention how the client knows that you are doing that, but you could always include a copy of the receipt for whatever it is with the facture.

Thanks Jonathan, much appreciated. That is interesting, and certainly makes sense. I’m not great with numbers at the best of times but having to negotiate my way through Etsy fees, processing fees, foreign exchange rates and then cotisations as well just gives me a headache! Plus, I have realised since posting this question that I was getting confused between tax and cotisations anyway, so at least I’ve got that sorted out now. I will look up ‘frais de débours’ and see if I can use it in future. Thanks again!

Hello there,
I wonder if either of you can help me understand the rules for taxes and social charges with Etsy. We don’t have a shop yet but are thinking of opening one. Do we have to set up before starting shop as M.E.in order to get a shirt number? or are we allowed to sell our old items (vintage section) as occasional individuals? .If I have understood correctly there is now a limit of earning 5000.00 before having to pay taxes. What I haven’t find out
a) is the 5000.00 eurlimit you are allowed to reach before having to pay tax on earnings just income tax or is it social charges as well?
b) do you declare it and then just not charged?

Of course I might have just misunderstood all of the information I found and it is none of these at all.
Hope someone can clarify for me and save me many more hours googling and labouring through french websites trying to find out.
Thanks

Regular selling, as opposed to selling the odd item via an ad on leboncoin or the like, is regarded as a business activity regardless of revenue. I would have thought with a shop on Etsy it would be difficult to argue that it’s not regular activity because why would you have set up a shop if not to sell things.
Good news is you don’t have to google far because etsy has a blog about it https://blog.etsy.com/fr/2011/statuts-professionnels-quel-statut-pour-vendre-sur-etsy/

Hi Briony,

I registered my business with the CCI in 2016 as a ME because it made sense - there are benefits to being an actual business rather than an individual: in particular the post office has an online service which offers better rates than in their branches which makes a huge difference, especially to the US which is where most of my customers are. Obviously there is nothing to stop you opening and selling without making it official, but it does really make sense to do so, even if you don’t intend to sell a huge amount.

I pay cotisations (the social charges) every quarter (you can also do this in one annual payment I think) again online - I believe this is 10% of your earnings if you are registered to sell brocante - and any tax is calculated separately as part of our household income. Although I haven’t yet earned over that threshold yet, obviously our total income is above that. You do legally have to declare everything you earn though.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thank you both I do realise I have to register and intend to do so. It was just in googling I got into a right muddle on a French site with the rules for ecommerce such as Airbnb, Etsy etc. where it seemed to be saying that you could earn upto 5000.00 euros without paying taxes and wasn’t sure it meant annual income tax or social charges or both. Chloe it is obvious from what you say it wasn’t referring to social charges.
I am sure when we are ready to set up and start to declare we will find out.
Briony