It’s the most wonderful time of the year! ?

Sorry if I’m still hung up on the holidays, guys. I didn’t want the festive season to end, too. 🙁

But back to reality - the new year gets us closer to 2 very important dates for registered freelancers:

• January 25: Business Permit Renewal Deadline
• January 31: BIR COR Renewal Deadline

So all law-abiding freelancers, take note...

After registering as taxpayers, filing quarterly forms, and paying your tax dues, DO NOT FORGET to renew your permits and registrations annually.

I know that we have various things in our minds daily, so this serves as a reminder to avoid unnecessary stress and penalties.

What You Need to Renew:

1. BIR Certificate of Registration
2. Mayor’s Permit

How to Renew your BIR Certificate of Registration:

Simply fill-in Form 0605 and pay the P500 fee through your BIR-accredited bank (if you’re filing manually) or online. Taxumo recently added this feature in their platform, too.

For reference on how to fill your form, here’s a picture:

How to Renew your Mayor’s Permit:

This is probably where it varies for us because some freelancers have registered as “businesses” while some registered as “professionals.”

I registered as a professional, so I only needed to renew my OTR at the city hall.

An Occupational Tax Receipt(OTR) serves as a permit to practice non-licensed occupations like photographers, writers, consultants, artists, etc.

As opposed to a Professional Tax Receipt (PTR) which is for licensed professionals like nurses, lawyers, engineers, etc.

Working online falls under non-licensed occupations so I secured an OTR when I first registered myself as a taxpayer.

Here’s my personal OTR Renewal experience for 2019:

1. The Cebu City government stationed in Robinsons Galleria for better accessibility. Yay!
2. I got there at 10am. They gave me a queue number for a Cedula and another number for the Miscellaneous Counter (I guess this was the cashier for the OTR fee).
3. The Cedula queue moved quickly, I got mine in just 10 minutes.

The Miscellaneous queue, however, was ?.

My queue number was H82. It was only H35 on the screen, after I got my cedula, and barely moving.

I think the Miscellaneous Counter caters to a bunch of different fees and there were only 2 counters, that’s why the queue was slowly moving.

Good thing we were inside the mall! I roamed around to kill the time while checking back every 30 minutes or so.

My turn came at around 12:35 pm. I paid P190 for the OTR fee then proceeded to the Special Permits Counter where they typed my new OTR.

At 12:42 pm, I was done! Here's my permit for 2019:

Apart from the waiting time to the cashier, I think it was an easy process overall!  Not bad for an annual government process.

If you registered as a ‘freelancing business’ and not a professional, I’m sorry that I can’t share much about the process because I haven’t personally experienced it.

I took some pictures from the venue, though.

Let's take a closer look...

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I hope these will give you ideas on what to expect during the renewal.

Don’t wait until the 4^th week to start renewing your permits and registrations.?

Cheers to a legal and penalty-free freelancing year ahead!