Disclaimer – I’m not a seasoned small businessman but i will try to keep details about my adventure here use advice at own risk.
Sofar from what i can tell setting up a small business in Canada is fairly easy if you make less than 30k per year. setup a PayPal business account and make some invoices with the online invoicing tool( etransfer is easier less costly paypal takes alot on large transfers ). CRA does look at PayPal business accounts so be sure to keep accurate expense list to keep track of things like.
- hourly rate * hours
- materials used / cost
- personal expenses – gas,travel,smokes (cannabis),meals,stay
“Registering for GST is mandatory for all small businesses with gross annual revenue greater than $30,000, unless your product or service is exempt. However, if you voluntarily register, you may be reimbursed for GST that you pay out for business expenses.” –
when invoicing for a small business put all expenses on the invoice with no gst or tax. (amazon and ebay are good places to sell things) opencart works good too(can be installed via softalacious).
2018 is my first year trying this so maybe read more into it if you are going to be using it alot.
finding investors can be hard even though its a huge world. best thing to do is do all the prototyping yourself and outsource the injection moulding or pcb making.
setting up a programming company fairly easy aswell, selling MIT, BSD licence code is fine and you can keep the sources private if you need to. LGPL code is fine to use/sell in projects according to the web. there have been no legal cases about your project becoming a derivative/collective work requiring access to project source code if its just dynamically linked.
