george@blog:~$

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Mitos Checklist: Greek bureaucracy, tick by tick

· 2 min read · #wordpress #greece #civic

Starting a business in Greece means a pile of procedures. The data exists. I turned it into checklists you can actually follow.

Starting as a sole trader in Greece is a quest with many side quests. You need this document, from that office, before the other thing, unless you did the third thing first, in which case there's a different form.

(Greek readers: you know exactly what I'm talking about. Everyone else: imagine a board game where the rules are on a wall in another building.)

The gap

The good news is that the information is public. The state publishes a registry of administrative procedures called Mitos, with the documents each one needs, the service that handles it and the law behind it. About 4,400 of them.

The less good news is that a registry is a database, not a plan. It tells you what a procedure is. It doesn't tell you what you're missing today.

What I made

A WordPress plugin that turns those procedures into preparation checklists.

  • Search the procedures, or pick the ones you need.
  • Tick off the documents you already have, and see what's still missing. Your progress and notes stay on your own device: no accounts, nothing sent to a server.
  • Every checklist links back to the original Mitos page and the official service, because I'm a checklist, not a lawyer.

There are also guided journeys. The first one is "start as a sole trader". It asks you three questions, hides the steps you don't need, tracks your progress, works out the e-EFKA deadline from your start date and offers a calendar reminder. Deadlines are my favourite part. Being late with the state is the only kind of lateness that sends a letter back.

Being honest about it

  • It's early. Version 0.1.0, one journey so far.
  • Mitos's API is marked as a trial service and may change. If it does, I will have a bad afternoon and then fix it.
  • The content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and every checklist credits Mitos.
  • The plugin can serve its own Greek website, so it works as a standalone site without a theme.

Greek administrative life won't become easy because I wrote a plugin. But a checklist at least makes the quest feel like it has an end.

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