The notification is due within a month. Then come the final declarations, and business assets move into private ownership — a taxable event of its own.
✓ Verified: 02/08/2026
WHAT TO DO
Finanzamt
Federal agencyThe BZSt is the federal body; your personal tax matters go to the Finanzamt for your registered address.
This is where the formality turns into real money. The tax office treats cessation as an event in its own right with its own calculation, and nearly all the unpleasant surprises arise at this step.
The closing declarations are easiest to assemble where the running bookkeeping already sat: sevDesk↗ and Lexware Office↗ export the shortened period up to the cessation date, while ELSTER↗ remains the official filing channel.
The final year of a business is not the year to economise on advice. The cessation profit arises precisely there, having never existed before, and a valuation error costs more than the fee.
I closed in March and calmly waited for the next year. The one-month notification period ran from March, though, not from the annual return.
The fiscal code states one month after the event to be reported. For a trade the route runs through the municipality, which informs the tax office without delay; for a liberal profession the notification goes directly to the tax office.
The same ones as usual, but for the shortened period up to the cessation date: the annual VAT return and the profit computation, and for small entrepreneurs with the thresholds of 25,000 euros in the previous year and 100,000 in the current one in mind.
They stop being business assets. The law treats cessation separately from a sale and attaches a cessation profit to it. A laptop, vehicle or equipment that stays with you is valued and enters that calculation.
Yes, but a narrow one. Where the taxpayer has reached the age of 55 or is permanently unfit for work in the social insurance sense, the profit is taxed only to the extent it exceeds 45,000 euros. The allowance is granted once in a lifetime and is reduced by the amount by which the profit exceeds 136,000 euros.