Back to the Philippines

This week I have a 5 day weekend! I decided to spend 1 day of these working with my husband as part of our trial phase to see and feel how it is to spend a day working with him.

Yesterday was a holiday here and it is called Queen’s Day but he wanted to still work in his office so I tagged along with him. My agenda for the day was to go through the documents that my mom had sent to us regarding setting up a business in the Philippines.

While working on the issues I felt that I wanted to talk to him however it was bad timing as he was very busy solving a technical problem in his web application. I felt kind of bored since I am used to having a lot of colleagues around me at work to have small talk with once a while. He also appeared to be very serious and not his normal self unlike at home. He admitted it was his usual self when at work. It was a very quiet office with only him and me in there. His partner was out partying in the streets.

There were times I wanted to talk about trivial things about the office location, buying software licenses etc etc but I guess it was pointless to talk about it now since we’re not in it yet and those things are details that is easily taken cared of once we’re there.

The points of discussion I wanted to talk also was about the structure of the company and taxes. Some of the business structures we are looking into are Joint Venture, Partnership and Corporation. A corporation is considered a Filipino corporation if it has at least 60% Filipino ownership. I found out in the tax tables that corporate tax in the Philippines is normally set at 32% and the ceiling of income tax is at roughly P125,000 + 34% of the Excess over P500,000 in 1998 according to the BIR site. Definitely, the first step would be is to apply at the Board of Investments to see if we get some incentives. Then we need to apply for a license by registering at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The rest of the details such as Corporate Insurance and paperwork for financial statements are too complex to discuss now and we need a professional to help us with it. This include Disability insurance, Medical coverage for employees, Workers Compensation and things like that. Another thing to do might be to apply at PEZA (Philippine Economic Zone Authority) to see if we could get benefits from it when we try to find office space. A bookkeeper is definitely a good thing to have also.

And then suddenly at around 3pm my mobile phone rang and I knew it was from work because of the ring tone I assigned to it (The Office US). And they were fortunate that I have brought my laptop and next thing you know I was logged in via VPN to my office PC. They needed me to run a job. I forgot that all of Europe was still working and only the Netherlands was on holiday. Suddenly, a crazy feeling of panic came to me again like it did before. I wasn’t so ready to deal with work now and my husband was a bit moody. I ended up being quite emotional. I am glad that at least we ended the day having dinner at our favorite Chinese place near our apartment. Funny thing how a bowl of wonton soup would lighten someone’s mood. The sunset I saw while at the restaurant was one of the best I’ve seen in months. Not a bad ending for our Queen’s Day at work.

The following were my references:

How to Invest in the Philippines by Isla, Lipana, and Company

Outsourcing IT 2 Philippines

Team Europe Philippines

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• Nothing personal — it’s only business