The opportunities of real-time economy in Estonia

Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and one of the country’s leading universities, TalTech, have conducted a poll to see how entrepreneurs feel about real-time economy opportunities in Estonia. Real-time economy consists of machine-readable and real-time digital solutions such as e-invoices, e-receipts and e-reports. The main goal is to achieve  a bureaucracy-free business environment.

e-Solutions that have already been developed in Estonia have made us pioneers in the digital economy sector.  The Estonian government is constantly trying to improve the business environment in Estonia and entrepreneurs continuously give feedback on the numerous e-Services that have been implemented.

At the moment, establishing a company in Estonia takes less than 20 minutes and submitting the income tax return takes around 3 minutes. Estonia also has trustworthy authentication methods and a secure X-road solution that’s the backbone of e-Estonia.

A small example of Estonia constantly improving the business environment is that from 01.06.2019 onwards businesses who are subject to VAT no longer need to submit income tax  and social tax return statements, given that the business had no outgoing payments for the period in question. A small change that further helps decrease the overall administrative burden businesses have to deal with. 

Still, a lot of time and money is spent on so called ’’empty work’’ – manually written delivery notes and reports, pdf invoices and other administrative activities.

According to the Minister of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure, Kadri Simson, running a business in the future should be a part of the e-ecosystem where entrepreneurs do not have spend time on tasks such as these.

Simson also mentioned that the goal is to create an environment where businesses can focus on innovation, creating new goods and services and entering new export markets instead of having to waste time on so-called ’’empty work’’. ’’It’s important to figure out how to raise the competitivness of businesses,’’ she added.

The poll is a part of a project initiated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. It's purpose was to gather input for the development of real-time economy opportunities in Estonia.

Incorporate in Estonia is constantly looking for ways to take advantage of new digital solutions that will make the lives of our customers easier. 

We recently started using a digitized expense and purchase management solution called Envoice that will let our customers enjoy completely paperless bookkeeping in the future.

Benefit from Estonia's advantageous business environment and start your own business in Estonia!

By Richard J. Witismann on 8 July, 2019