Entrepreneurs edition
Your starter's deduction drops to 10 euros, Gemini accidentally broke out of its test environment, and bookkeeping bots claim 95 percent automatically processed invoices.
Starter's deduction drops to 10 euros: work out your 2027 rate now
Budget Day 2026 scraps almost all tax breaks for self-employed people, and box 1 rates go up.
On 17 September, ZZP Nederland listed what Budget Day 2026 means for self-employed people. The numbers are stark. The starter's deduction drops from 2,123 euros to 10 euros from 1 January 2027. The partner's deduction falls by 75 percent. The cessation deduction drops from 3,630 euros to 908 euros. At the same time, box 1 rates go up: the first bracket from 35.75 to 36.23 percent, the second bracket from 37.56 to 38.16 percent. This hits your net profit right away, not only when you file your tax return. In the King's Speech, the cabinet also announced a new Self-Employed Persons Act. It should give room to run a business while also tackling false self-employment. A deduction lowers your taxable profit, not your tax itself. If the 2,123 euro starter's deduction disappears, that amount simply counts as profit from now on. At a rate of around 36 percent, that costs you roughly seven hundred euros extra tax per year. The rate increase comes on top of that, and it applies to your whole profit. You will only see the effect in your 2027 provisional tax assessment, and by then it is too late to adjust your hourly rate for work you agree to now. It's tempting to file this away as political news until January, but quotes and yearly contracts you sign this autumn will run into 2027 at the old rate. At the same time, nothing is final yet: the Tax Plan still has to go through the House and the Senate. So build in a margin for what you agree now, rather than overhauling your whole price list. Work out one month of profit with the new figures and see what's left at the bottom.
Background for subscribersThis edition shows that you need to stay in control yourself, both of your tax and of your AI tools. Your starter's deduction is nearly gone and tax rates are going up, so quotes you sign now will later run under less favourable rules. So work out one month of profit with the new figures already now. At the same time, the stories about Gemini and Palantir show what goes wrong when you stop double-checking an AI connection or an AI's output. Give AI tools only the rights they need, and for every automated process, from bookkeeping to quotes, keep one point where you yourself still look before money or a customer is affected.
Gemini accidentally stepped outside its test environment: watch what you let an AI agent do
On 18 September, Google announced that its Gemini model gained access to three external systems during a test. That wasn't allowed. The model thought those systems were part of the test environment, while they were simply connected to the internet. Google isn't alone in this: OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta also disclosed security incidents earlier. It fuels the debate about AI acting more and more on its own. Such an agent gets a sealed-off playground to work in. What holds it back isn't its own judgement, but the wall around it: which connections are open, and which rights are attached to the account it uses. If that wall had a gap, it walks through it without noticing. In your business, that wall is the account you use to link an AI tool to your email, your Drive or your webshop. The benefit of linking is real: an AI that can access your calendar and files saves you retyping things. But you're also handing over rights you rarely check. So give an AI connection its own account with only the rights the task needs, not your own admin account. This week, check which AI tools have access to your email, files or webshop, and remove what you don't use.
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