[kictanet] More support for springing startups

[Michael Pedersen]

Hi Everyone,

Personally I think this focus on "making easy to register a business" is 
misplaced, the focus should instead be on making easier "having a business".
Annoying as the registration process may be, it is only a one-off 
process once it's done it will not bother you again - whereas the 
processes you have to complete on a monthly, quarterly, yearly 
introduces overhead time and time again.

My favorite example is ofcourse all the monthly statutory payments, 
NSSF, NHIF, KRA, NITA, etc all have their own individual process. Each 
institution have their own process, their own collection procedure, 
their own queue's. You can easily spend several hours completing a 
monthly return - for each of them.
Why can't they work together so that you go to ONE place and perform ONE 
payment, then they could split the collections between them self.
A few years back it was announced that KRA would start becoming a 
collection point for NSSF, this was a step in the right direction. The 
day before it was supposed to go into effect it was announced that it 
was postponed due to the IT-systems not being compatible.... (the inital 
iTax version even had a non-working button for it)


Second example would be the requirements for nil-returns, often when you 
see someone registering a new company they are quite "green" in terms of 
what their obligations are, there is a learning curve to climb. Often 
you find startup's in a situation where they had been caught unaware 
about the need to file nil-returns, and the business activities they had 
planned is delayed for whatever reason.
Why is it even necessary to file a nil return (?), could it not be 
assumed that if nothing else is filed then it's a nil-return... Yes 
there are practical (and maybe legal) reasons but it really should be 
possible to work around this and make it unnecessary to file nil-returns.


On the bright side the new company act removes the need to have an 
official company secretary to do your annual legal return - that is a 
clear improvement for startups and helps reduce the overall overhead.

..
Mike


On 2/1/16 3:03 PM, Ahmed Mohamed Maawy via kictanet wrote:
>
>  1. How to make the business registration process a bit less hectic.
>  2. Tax breaks for some amount of time during which they operate to
>     pick up business and traction around this.
>
> Having managed the eco-system in Mombasa for a while, I think you end 
> up finding potential kids and other chaps having ideas, but who can 
> not enter into some contests or can not be eligible to enroll to 
> specific support frameworks because of their lack of a business 
> registration certificate. Which is sad, to see such potential go all 
> the way down the drain because of financial or other constraints.
>
> There is a pipeline issue for potential startups here that needs to be 
> resolved, but how can we work together around this?
>

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