PCLI/VAPZ: which one to choose?

The end of the year is nearing, and it's time for me, and maybe all belgian starters, to take a look at what your income will be and optimise your fiscal situation.

First thing: if you have income higher than 11000€ for the year and you decided to pay the minimum social security contribution of 600€, you will have a regularisation, in the sense that you will have to pay you social contribution on your revenue above 11000€. The trick is that those social contributions are deductible from the revenue you have to put in your tax declaration. But for that to apply, you have to make the payment this year! (here's some more info: fr, nl).

If you started after 30 march, also note that this year is not full, you have only 3 quarters. It means that the definitive social contributions you will have to pay will be based on your revenue of next year. For the social contribution, you better make profit this year than next. But remember that more profit this year mean you'll pay more taxes too. So honestly, I'm not sure how this all combines. Any hint?

And finally, the subject of this post: as an indépendant/zelfstandige you can subscribe to a additional retirement fund: FAPZ (in dutch)/PCLI (in french). You can contribute up to 8.17% of your revenue, with a maximum of 2686.05€ yearly. And it's 100% deductible from your revenue!

You'll see there is a social vapz/pcli, which includes a guaranteed revenue insurance, but it's not that interesting I've heard: the part of your payment going to the retirement fund is lower, as you pay your guaranteed revenue insurance of course.

Now my question: any advice on where I should take my vapz/pcli? Are there big differences between the providers? I'm currently at Acerta, which works with KBC. Any opinion on their offering?

Furthermore, any further advice on optimisation of revenue for independant workers?

Arranging my holidays as a freelance

It might seem strange that after my first week as a freelance, I already talk about holidays, but I think it's more than normal. For example, I have developed a tool to manage the production lines of a company, and if that tool stops working, they're in big trouble. If this happens when I'm on holiday, in the middle of the mountains where a GSM is completely useless and internet connection is even more utopic, they're in HUGE trouble. Although I would enjoy my hollyday, ignoring what happens, my return would be that more catastrophic.

As it is not possible to find a solid solution in the last weeks before leaving, and although no holiday is planned yet, I am already putting all pieces in place. The first one is

Documentation
If I want someone else to be on call and the point of contact of my customers, that someone should have all what is needed to also solve the possible problems, know the history with the customer, etc. The best way to achieve that is to extensively document all what is done: source code, infrastructure, requests from the customer, etc
Although source code comments should be a natural reflex, I hadn't found the tool I wanted to use for the rest. But this is now ok: I'll use Dokuwiki. It's really the perfect tool for that task: simple formatting; storage done in text files, making the content available in any text editor, and making integration with source code control tools easy; tons of plugins; file attachments; private wikis possible.

A positive side effect is also that I'll build a knowledge base I'll be able to use for future projects.

But if documentation is a necessary condition, it's not sufficient. You also need

Someone you trust
If you share all your documentation, contacts, etc, you'd better be sure that person won't short-circuit you and steal your customer. Although I want to build a relation of trust with my customers, making such a move more difficult, I'd rather work with someone I trust.

And I have the chance to know the right person! It's been some time now that I work closely with Bart from Zeropoint.it for MyOwnDB and other things. This collaboration has let us build a relation of trust, to the point that I'll contract Zeropoint to care for my customers during my holidays. Zeropoint has a team spread over Belgium and Pakistan, providing customised IT solutions in all domains you can imagine. With the good documentation I'll provide them, I'll be able to go on holiday with peaceful mind!

So if you're ever going freelance, one of the first things you should think of is your holiday! Isn't that great?

First training day... as a trainer

Today was the first day of the training about "Mastering Unix shell scripting" that I'm giving for Zeropoint.it. As a lot of fellow FOSS people, I've learned a lot by myself and I have only followed a couple of trainings, so I can't say a lot of things like "it's strange to be on the other side".

What I find the strangest thing however is to be considered the specialist. I've never considered myself a specialist, as I prefer to learn a lot of different things. A trainer however is by definition the specialist in the room, and I hope I've made honour to that title :-)

It's hard to evaluate my performance though as it's really really hard to have interaction with the attendants. It's as if they don't dare to ask a question during the class. I've made sure however they understood what was taught today and I answered all questions that surfaced along the day. I hope I'll get to know the content of their anonymous feedback form at the end of the training!

I really enjoyed it, so thanks Bart for giving me this opportunity. I could even start to think to prepare trainings I would love to give. For example about "Mastering vim". Any takers?

Which professional insurance?

Today was another milestone in my transition to freelance: I resigned from my position at Easynet. There's no turning back now!

And I need to look for a professional insurance. Imagine I'm at a customer premises, and I step on one of these power block with a power switch and I stop the central server, that doesn't want to boot up again, leading to losses for this customer.

Or there's data loss in the course of my project (this being my fault or not). Or a config change corrupts a database leading to 2 hours downtime. I'd like to be covered by an insurance. But what should I pay attention to? And how much does it cost? What do such insurances costs?

I'll have to look around, but any advice is welcome of course!

Going for it!

So now it's decided. I'll go as freelance.

As I was already freelance in addition to my full-time job, paperwork is very limited: I only have to change my profile at Acerta, where I am currently affiliated, but who I could leave next year as they're far from responsive....

I'll possibly take one of two profiles:

• specialist in data structuration and management with web applications, in which I have multiple years experience, as employee at Easynet, as freelance, and with MyOwnDB
• As I'm not sure I'd like to do only data management, and as I did a bit of everything in the past and still love learning new things, maybe I can propose to handle whatever problems a company encounters: database, LDAP, mail, web, networking, etc

As I am working on an EZ Publish project and enjoy it, I also might continue in that direction.

And I hope to also bring Profoss to the next level!

Looking at that, I guess you can see I have had to decide rapidly :-)
I haven't had the time to iron out all details, but getting in the action without time to ask too much question might be a good thing.