Back in March, I had a long soliloquy of the year that has passed: both wins and challenges. When I decided to leave being employed full-time, I knew that we’d have to also change our status from employed to self-employed in BIR, and file our taxes accordingly based from this.
We gave ourselves a deadline that by June, we had to finish this. And finished, we did.
I personally spent weeks researching about this. We knew that we’d rather do the registration ourselves because, well, DIY-ing is life. It is also always better to know the process so we are not caught off guard and we minimize surprises. We originally intended to hire someone to do it in our behalf, but we eventually opted otherwise as that’d still a couple of thousand of pesos. Yikes.
We had been longtime employees and these matters had been usually taken care for us by our respective HRs.
As for the registration itself, BIR has been championing since lockdown for new businesses, freelancers, etc. to take advantage of the online registration via the NewBizReg portal. We almost proceeded with this as it was reportedly a streamlined way of registering. (They also have an online appointment system, by the way).
On the other hand, we’ve read mixed feedback online on how fast they process such applications. Granted we’ll have ours in Makati, which in our opinion more adaptive to new technologies/processes, we still decided to personally do it.
The result is a bunch of paperworks: Certificate of Registration (COR), BIR-printed receipts, and Books of Accounts (Had to watermark this aggressively as my Pag-Ibig check from a post in 2013 was stolen by other websites — it even had my name on those posts).
