Example : we organised a trip to a large trade fair and got 1000 € support pledged verbally by a large chip maker. As we get to the date of the trip, we get an

Example : we organised a trip to a large trade fair and got 1000 € support pledged verbally by a large chip maker. As we get to the date of the trip, we get an email in English from the (apparently British) accounting department :they need a contract for sponsorship. We tell them that we thought they just wanted to donate the money (as did other German companies), mails go back and forth. Finally we slapped their logo on our site for the trip, added the tax we would have to pay on the money, then sent an invoice. As our tax consultant explained to me, they can reclaim the added tax through their own tax return, resulting in a net exchange of exactly 1000€- whatever the labour costs of everyone involved. Now, this trip was not too bad, but possible complications are : * What you get sponsoring for needs to be in proportion to the amount of money, leading us to need way more volunteers than originally planned just to deal with the overhead of the sponsor services in a career fair we organised * If you are tax exempt for charitable purposes, you need to very cleanly separate donation funded things from sponsorship or otherwise business funded stuff, because subsidising a lossy business is only rarely legal German-cultured(DACH) companies get the idea of "give money as a donation because what they do benefits us" a lot more than Anglo-Saxon cultured ones, at least in my experience, which might be reflected in the law