Explanation6 min lezen
Annual accounts or profit tax return?
In this article
Your annual accounts show how your business is doing; your tax return determines how much tax you pay. They concern the same year and the same records, but they do not follow the same rules — and they go to different readers.
Side by side
| Kolom | Annual accounts | Tax return |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Accountability for the financial year | Determining the tax |
| For whom | Yourself, shareholders, bank, KVK | The Belastingdienst |
| Rules | Title 9 of Book 2 of the Dutch Civil Code or sound business practice | Tax legislation (Income Tax Act 2001, Corporate Income Tax Act) |
| Deadline | Prepare within five months, then adopt and file | Its own deadlines, separate from the annual accounts |
Where they diverge
- Depreciation: for tax purposes limits and minimum periods apply that can differ from your commercial depreciation.
- Provisions: a concrete provision is often deductible, a general provision usually is not.
- Non-deductible costs: think of fines, certain entertainment costs or part of the car costs.
- Entrepreneur deductions: the self-employed deduction and similar items belong in the tax return and not in the annual accounts.
- Private use addition on a car: that is a tax adjustment, not an item in your annual accounts.
- Investment deduction: a tax deduction that does not change your result in the annual accounts.
The annual accounts are the starting point
In practice the tax return starts from the commercial result in your annual accounts, after which you apply the tax adjustments. Without correct annual accounts, a good tax return cannot be prepared.Permanent and temporary differences
Some differences never disappear: a fine is an expense commercially and never deductible for tax purposes. Others come back: if you depreciate a car commercially over five years and for tax purposes over seven, the difference evens out later. That distinction is exactly what you show in the reconciliation between the result and the taxable profit.
The terms taxable profit, permanent difference and temporary difference are in the glossary.
What the Belastingdienst wants to see in an audit
Questions about your profit come with a request for a balance sheet, a profit and loss account and a statement of changes in equity: the difference between your business equity at the start and at the end of the year. If those three reconcile, an audit is usually finished quickly.
That is why the reconciliation of equity matters so much: that single sum shows whether your records are correct.
Frequently asked questions
Must I send my annual accounts with the tax return?
Why is my taxable profit different from my result?
What is a statement of changes in equity?
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Read articlePrepare your annual accounts yourself?
Work through the wizard, check your figures and download the annual accounts and the KVK filing documents as PDFs. € 60,44 per financial year, once.
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