Your Spanish SL, without depending on a gestoría that explains nothing

Why the expat accounting tools stop at the autónomo

The online gestorías and slick apps marketed to foreigners in Spain are almost all built around the autónomo, the self-employed individual. A company is a different animal: it needs double-entry accounting, corporate income tax, legalised official books and its own set of returns. Rather than build all of that, most tools simply exclude the SL, so a search that starts with hope ends with only for autónomos.

• The expensive route: a traditional gestoría that works over email, bills by the hour and sends you documents in Spanish you have to trust blindly.
• The unreadable route: capable Spanish accounting software that assumes you already speak the tax language of Spain.

Neither lets a foreign founder actually understand their own company. kontora is the third option: software that treats the SL as a first-class citizen and explains every figure in your language.

Double-entry books your SL cannot knock out of balance

An SL is legally required to keep double-entry accounting, where every entry has a debit and a matching credit. kontora enforces that rule at the core, so the books simply cannot drift out of balance: debits and credits always tie out. That is the difference between a spreadsheet you hope is right and accounts you can stand behind.

• Official books (libros oficiales): the journal (libro diario) and the book of inventories and annual accounts, prepared and ready.
• Bank reconciliation: import your movements in the standard Spanish norma 43 format and match them against your entries.
• Depreciation (amortizaciones), year-end close (cierre) and balancing (cuadre): the closing steps that trip people up, handled in order.

Everything is labelled in plain English, Spanish or Russian, so you are never guessing what a line means.

Corporate income tax (Impuesto de Sociedades), box by box

Your SL pays Impuesto de Sociedades (corporate income tax) and files it with modelo 200 (the annual return) plus modelo 202 (the instalment payments during the year). kontora drafts both box by box, alongside the rest of a company's paperwork: IVA (VAT) on modelos 303 and 390, withholdings on 111, 190, 115 and 180, and the information returns 347 and 349.

• The general corporate tax rate is 25%.
• A newly created company that meets the conditions pays 15% in its first profitable year and the next.
• As a micro-enterprise (turnover under 1 million euros), in 2026 it pays 19% up to 50,000 euros of taxable base and 21% above, dropping to 17% and 20% from 2027.

kontora also watches the BOE (Spain's official gazette) for changes and warns you before each deadline. Being honest: it generates the drafts and guides you, it does not file for you, so the final submission on the AEAT website is done by you or your gestor. To see how the first year works, read our guide on the corporate tax of your first year, and check every rate in the 2026 tax figures.

Your SL and your autónomo, in one account

Many foreign founders wear two hats: the SL, and their own autónomo (self-employed) registration. kontora is multi-company, so both live under one login and you switch between them in a click, each with its own books and returns.

There is a catch worth knowing. If you control your SL and work in it, Spanish social security treats you as an autónomo societario (company-director self-employed) in the RETA (the special scheme for the self-employed), and the new-starter tarifa plana (the flat reduced contribution) does not apply to you: budget for the full monthly contribution from month one.

If you set the company up with the 1 euro minimum capital under Ley 18/2022 (the Crea y Crece law), remember the small print while capital stays below 3,000 euros: you must put 20% of each year's profit into the legal reserve, and shareholders answer for the shortfall up to 3,000 euros if the company is wound up short. Not sure the SL is even the right shape for you? Our guide on autónomo or SL lays out the honest trade-offs.

Invoicing and selling across the EU

Invoicing in kontora is Verifactu-ready, built to meet Spain's Verifactu billing rules, so what you send clients is the same data that feeds your books. You can read what that system is in our guide on what Verifactu is.

If your SL sells to businesses elsewhere in the European Union, a few rules kick in, and kontora handles the paperwork for them:

• Modelo 349, the recapitulative statement of intra-EU operations: there is no minimum amount, and the 50,000 euro quarterly threshold decides whether you file monthly or quarterly.
• You must appear in VIES by registering in the ROI (the register of intra-community operators) through modelo 036.
• B2B intra-EU sales use the reverse charge (inversión del sujeto pasivo), so you invoice without IVA and your client accounts for the tax.

Clients in the United Kingdom, Switzerland or the United States are not intra-community, so those rules do not apply to them. kontora is in free beta with a waitlist, so you can put a Spanish SL on solid, readable accounting before you pay a cent.

Where to start

Frequently asked questions