Hi Hayley,

First of all, many thanks to Elgestor for that very useful post on Autonomo obligations.

I have some experience in 2007 of setting up to work in the Canary Islands, which are under Spanish law. A brief history follows:

Visited February to look at a multiple unit property investment, and decided to invest, along with six other colleagues.

The deal went south when a broker ran away with some of our funds. We initiated two legal cases against the broker.

Realizing the deal still had much potential, my wife and I decided to set up a Spanish S.L. The deal is far greater than just a simple investment in a few apartments, so it was deemed appropriate to do the S.L. and register as autonomos.

August 2007. Four trip. The S.L. was completed.

October 2007. Sixth trip. I rented a local apartment and stopped living out of the Sheraton.

December 2007. Completed our first year's operations, and spent a week there over Christmas with the family for a bit of relaxation and planning for 2008.

We have made good use of a lawyer, an accountant and an agent, who himself has decided to register as an autonomo.

Both from the hotel, and also from the apartment, I got a Vodaphone pay as you go mobile SIM, and have been able to access the internet via a wireless paid service, so have also been able to take care of our other UK business whilst living in the Canaries. I now have an official office address at the place of our lawyer's business, and a residential address at the place we rent an apartment, so can conduct business there even though I only spend one week per month locally.

I have come to know around 20 British expats who live out there, ranging from those who work unofficially, to those who have fully registered S.L. companies. I have put quite a few challenges to our accountant (I interviewed three accountants before I decided on one to use, and they were equally challenged to answer some of my more esoteric questions). What I have ended up doing for 2007, because we also run a Ltd Co in the UK, is to bill our Spanish company for my services on an "apartment sold" basis, enabling me to maintain our UK tax and personal income reporting unaffected by what we have done in Spain. To date, I have not drawn a salary from our S.L. but am curious as to why the autonomo payments have to come from our personal bank accounts and not from our company bank account.

Joining this forum has paid dividends already, in reading through many posts on here, and I suppose I will learn an awful lot more in the next few weeks.

Anyway, I hope my own experience has encouraged you to keep going with your Spanish enterprise. For our own sins, we have registered companies in five jurisdictions in the last fifteen years, so it wasn't a big deal. We went into this quickly knowing we would be learning as we went, and we achieved the objective we were looking for.

Into 2008, we want to rent an office locally, and by mid next year, I am sure we will need to address the requirements to hire staff. Via our autonomo agent, we have three people working for us part time, and like a lot of people in Spain, they seem to be naturally tax-averse, but over time I am sure we will find a way for them to get onto the straight and narrow, or use services of those who are already accustomed to doing things the right legal way. since our company pays all fees to other autonomos via bank transfer, I am leaving it to my accountant to do the right thing. With reference to the 15% you mentioned, I think it referred to this as an example. Our lawyer sends his fees per property transaction to our company, but his equivalent of autonomo tax has to be paid by our company. Eg. if he bills us €1,000, our company also has to pay €150 in taxes having paid an autonomo providing professional services his fees "before tax". I don't pretend to understand this, but I think this fee does not apply if the legal customer is not itself an autonomo or a S.L. I will ask more questions once we've got over the first tax payment due 20th January.

I hope this has been of some help. Don't hesitate to ask more specific questions.