Minimize all costs, take labor as profit
With the raising of the taxable threshold to 500 million VND/year, many business households believe that the new regulation has partly created room for small-scale trading activities. However, when going into actual operation, many household owners still have to calculate carefully to ensure business efficiency.
As the owner of a newly opened coffee shop in the suburban area, Mr. Do Minh Duc (An Bien ward, Hai Phong) mainly serving residents in the area - said: "The shop has just opened, so the number of customers is not large, mainly serving regular customers. I take advantage of my family's available space to reduce costs, if I have to rent, the pressure will be greater.
In addition, Mr. Duc also calculates plans to optimize costs. Mr. Duc shared that coffee sales revenue has to bear a series of fixed costs: electricity, water, air conditioning, raw materials, premises and especially decoration costs according to holidays and Tet. For each Christmas or Lunar New Year, decoration costs can be up to tens of millions of dong. This is a necessary factor to retain customers, especially in the context of increasing competition.
To balance costs, Mr. Duc chose the option of directly participating in operating the restaurant, only hiring some additional support workers during peak hours. "The restaurant owner must take labor as profit, do many stages themselves to reduce personnel hiring costs, considering it as a way to optimize resources in the early stages" - Mr. Duc said.
Looking at reality, Mr. Duc believes that many coffee and fashion stores, although always crowded with customers, still have to close after only one or two years because they do not have enough profits to cover expenses. In the context of increasing costs, if spending billions of VND in capital but only earning tens of millions of VND per month, even lower, then continuing business becomes no longer attractive.
In addition to changes in business to meet the new tax mechanism, many business households want to have differentiation with the proposal to raise the mandatory threshold for using electronic invoices with tax authority codes, electronic invoices generated from cash computers with data connection with tax authorities from 1 billion VND to 3 billion VND.
Ms. Bui Thi Tuyet (Yen Hoa ward, Hanoi), a household business owner of groceries, believes that it is necessary to look at the specifics of each industry instead of applying a "common level".
Revenue in the grocery industry is usually high because goods circulate quickly, but the difference per product is not large" - Ms. Tuyet stated.
She gave an example, a barrel of beer costs about 250,000 VND but the profit is only 5,000-10,000 VND. The combined revenue can be up to several billion VND per year, but the actual profit received is not much.
According to Ms. Tuyet, many essential consumer goods have low profit margins, accumulated revenue can reach several billion VND per year but requires a large amount of goods and continuous turnover. "The same revenue level but the business characteristics between groceries, fashion or coffee are very different" - Ms. Tuyet added.
2 types of taxes household businesses must pay from 2026
