Kerrygold

Excellent site at www.careers.govt.nz/

TIE

Opening a company in NZ is VERY EASY and VERY CHEAP.

All you need to do is go on to www.companies.govt.nz, register yourself and reserve your company name. It costs about NZ$50-60 to register a company and they send you the forms etc by email.

Then you apply for a IRD (tax) number which is also your GST number www.ird.govt.nz

Opening a company bank acct is also pretty straightforward.

You are then ready to go.....print up some business cards & stationery & you're off.

Whole process takes about a week or so. You dont need to have the co set up for you by an accountant although many offer this as a service & do the same process as above - some for a hefty fee of course!

It is a good idea of course to have an accountant to do your final accounts, but you can do a lot of the stuff yourself online, inlcuding GST returns. Also a good idea to keep your own accounts up to date. There are a few simple NZ accounts/cashbook software packages including Cashbook Complete (I use this and its cheap & very simple), & MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) (more extensive functionality & a bit more $ to buy - very popular esp with slightly larger businesses with stock control, wages etc)

There are over 300,000 small businesses in NZ of which 95% or so are run from home, often as a sideline to employment. There is no reason why you cant run several companies from home, if you want.

Be aware that you do have to be pretty good about filing annual returns (online at companies.govt.nz), GST returns (again can be done online either monthly, 2-monthly or 6-monthly) and accounts/tax returns for the business and yourself personally.

Tax deductions arent that generous but you can usually deduct about 10% of your house premises costs (mortgage/rent, elec, gas etc) as a business expense if you have an office at home (the actual proportion should reflect the proportion of the house floor space taken up by the office, plus a bit for "public access areas")

The hard part of course is making any money.... and this is where the problems come in. The NZ market is pretty small and there are lots of businesses (300,000 or so!) chasing the dollars.

I would suggest that you need to be VERY CAREFUL before buying an existing business. So many expats have come very short doing this only to find that the customers evaporate with the previous owner...

Employing people is alo a bit of a minefield with LOTS of regulations you need to be aware of...

anyway, I have gone on longer than I intended, but I've done this quite successfully over the last several years & learned a few lessons along the way...

One area that could be interesting for Interior Decor is that of shop decor. There seem to be lots of little shops opening & closing in many of the suburban areas, especially on Auckland's North Shore. So many seem to spend a lot of money completely redecorating what existed previously even if that was only done 6-9 months ago. The decorators must be making some money...

good luck

Conor