Do You Need an Accountant in Georgia?

Almost every registered business in Georgia files a tax declaration every month, and a new owner has to decide who prepares it. A missed or wrong declaration brings penalties that apply automatically, with interest accruing daily on any unpaid tax. This post explains whether you need an accountant in Georgia for each business type, what changes the answer, what an accountant does each month and what the work costs.

Who Needs an Accountant in Georgia, by Business Type

An individual entrepreneur with Small Business Status, no VAT registration and a handful of invoices a month can file without an accountant. We advise an accountant for a VAT-registered business, a business with employees and an LLC. The monthly filing is required whoever prepares it, and Georgia has no licensing requirement for routine bookkeeping. How much recordkeeping the law requires depends on the legal form and the registrations the business holds.

Business type	Bookkeeping required	What makes filing harder	Filing alone
Individual entrepreneur with Small Business Status, no VAT registration, a handful of invoices	Tax source documents only	The Georgian-language portal	Realistic, about 20 minutes a month
The same entrepreneur with a high invoice volume	Tax source documents only	Many payments to log, convert and total	Possible, but the work takes much longer than 20 minutes
Individual entrepreneur without the status	Full income and expense accounts from the start	Expense deductions depend on documented costs	Only if you can keep full accounts
VAT-registered entrepreneur, with or without the status	Full accounts, with VAT recorded at the time of supply	A separate VAT return every month	We advise an accountant
Business with employees	The accounts its legal form requires	Payroll and pension declarations every month	We advise an accountant
LLC	Full accounts from incorporation	A corporate tax declaration every month, and SARAS financial statements where they are due	We advise an accountant

The table covers bookkeeping and declarations. A statutory audit is separate: it is generally required for companies in SARAS Category I or II and for Public Interest Entities, and it is an external engagement.

Who Can File Taxes Without an Accountant

The business that can file alone is an individual entrepreneur with Small Business Status who sits well below the VAT threshold and invoices a handful of clients a month. The law asks this entrepreneur for no formal income and expense ledger. While the status is in place and VAT has not been triggered, the only records to hold are the tax source documents, which in practice means the invoices and receipts.

Article 72 of the Tax Code requires each of these documents to identify the parties, carry a date, list what was supplied and its value, and exist in at least two identical copies. The minimum retention period is three years, counted from the end of the calendar year a document belongs to, so an invoice issued in March 2026 is kept until the end of 2029 at the earliest.

Filing alone means doing these steps yourself every month, which takes about 20 minutes in most months for this profile:

1. Log each payment you receive, with its date and currency.
2. Convert each foreign-currency payment to lari at the official rate of the National Bank of Georgia on the date the payment landed.
3. Calculate 18% reverse VAT on any service bought from outside Georgia, such as hosting, a software subscription or a foreign contractor, and file the separate reverse VAT declaration for it alongside the main one.
4. Log in to rs.ge, the Revenue Service portal, enter the month’s turnover in lari and submit the declaration by the 15th of the following month.
5. Pay the tax from a Georgian bank account as a treasury payment under the unified code 101001000.
6. Check on rs.ge a day or two later that the payment was matched to your account.

The same steps apply in a month with no income, because a zero declaration is still due by the 15th. Step 3 is missed often, since reverse VAT applies even when you are not VAT registered. Filing and paying are separate actions, and the tax payment is made through the bank, not inside rs.ge.

When You Need an Accountant in Georgia

We advise an accountant once the business registers for VAT, hires a first employee or becomes an LLC. A high transaction volume and the Georgian-language portal also add to the monthly work.

VAT Registration

You have to register for VAT when taxable turnover across any continuous 12 months goes above ₾100,000, and you can register voluntarily before that. Once a VAT obligation exists, an entrepreneur with Small Business Status needs a full income and expense ledger as well as the source documents. The monthly filing also gains a separate VAT return covering output VAT charged and input VAT reclaimed.

VAT is recorded at the taxable moment, which is the earliest of the delivery, the invoice or an advance payment. Work delivered and invoiced on 28 June goes into June’s filing, even when the client pays on 9 July.

Payroll and Pension Declarations for Employees

Once you hire, you run payroll every month, calculate pension contributions, which are shared by the employer, the employee and the state, and file withholding declarations. Payroll and pension declarations are filed on the same 15th deadline as the income or corporate declaration.

LLC Accounting and Reporting Requirements

An LLC keeps full accounts from incorporation, whatever its turnover. It files a corporate tax declaration every month, including months with no distribution, when nothing is owed. LLC accounting also uses accrual timing, so income is recorded in the month the work was delivered and invoiced.

An LLC is also placed in a reporting category by SARAS, the Service for Accounting, Reporting and Auditing Supervision, based on total assets, revenue and average headcount. Where annual financial statements are due, they go to SARAS by 1 October of the year after the reporting period, and filing every monthly declaration on time does not satisfy this obligation.

Transaction Volume

Each bank statement row, invoice and expense has to be recorded separately. Two individual entrepreneurs with the same status can therefore have very different workloads, for example 3 client invoices a month for one and 60 transactions a month for the other. This is why providers charge more as transaction volume rises.

The rs.ge Portal Is in Georgian

The taxpayer cabinet, the declaration forms and the menus you use each month are in Georgian. Revenue Service notices and the portal’s support are in Georgian too. If you misread a field, the declaration is still submitted with a wrong figure in it, and you learn of the error only when the Revenue Service raises it.

A taxpayer account can be set up so that an authorised person acts on it, and this is how an accountant files without you logging in each month.

What an Accountant Does Each Month

The monthly work has the same parts for every client. The client times in the table are from our own process.

When	What the accountant does	Your part
After the month ends	Collects invoices issued and received, bank statements, contracts and cash receipts on a schedule	Upload the documents, 15 to 20 minutes
Before the 15th	Records each transaction against its source document in the period it belongs to, calculates reverse VAT, converts foreign currency at the correct rate, files every return on rs.ge and confirms it is done	None
By the 15th	Tells you the amount to pay and where it goes	Pay from a Georgian bank account, about 5 minutes
Through the year	Warns you about an approaching VAT threshold or a SARAS deadline, and keeps the records for at least the statutory minimum	None

Which returns go into the monthly declaration depends on the registration: a turnover declaration for an entrepreneur with Small Business Status, a corporate tax declaration for an LLC, and VAT and payroll returns where they apply.

You remain responsible to the Revenue Service for every declaration filed under your name, including one an accountant filed. Ask a provider to state in writing who carries the cost of a filing error. If your current accountant is not doing the work in the table, changing accountant is routine: the outgoing provider hands over rs.ge access and the new one reviews what has been filed before taking over.

How Much an Accountant Costs in Georgia

Outsourced accounting is priced by complexity. The middle column of the table shows researched market ranges, and the last column shows our own packages.

Business profile	Typical market range a month	Our package
Entrepreneur with Small Business Status, no VAT registration, light volume	Roughly ₾100 to ₾350	Lite, ₾180 for up to 10 transactions
Entrepreneur with Small Business Status, higher volume	Roughly ₾300 to ₾600	Lite, ₾315 for 11 to 30 transactions or ₾495 for 31 to 60
VAT-registered entrepreneur or simple LLC	Roughly ₾300 to ₾900	Lite from ₾180 for a simple LLC with no VAT registration, Business from ₾315 with VAT
LLC with employees, payroll and pension	Roughly ₾500 to ₾1,300	Business, from ₾315
Virtual Zone, International Company or Free Industrial Zone company	From roughly ₾800, often quoted individually	Business, from ₾315

Our prices exclude 18% VAT, and more than 60 transactions a month is quoted. The price is fixed by transaction volume, where one bank statement row, invoice, payment or expense counts as one transaction. At ₾180 a month, a year on Lite costs ₾2,160 before VAT.

How to Decide Between Filing Alone and an Accountant

Compare the fee with the time the filing takes you and with the cost of an error. Filing alone stays reasonable while all of these are true:

• you hold Small Business Status
• you are not VAT registered and your turnover is well below ₾100,000
• you have no employees
• you issue a handful of invoices a month
• you can work in the Georgian-language taxpayer cabinet

When one of them stops being true, the recordkeeping increases and a mistake costs more. Most non-resident owners file the first month or two themselves, then hire an accountant once the time spent correcting errors is worth more to them than the fee.

Questions to Ask an Accountant Before Hiring

Bookkeeping has no licensing requirement, so quality varies most among the cheapest providers. Before you sign, ask the provider:

• whether it handles reverse VAT and when that applies to your business
• who files if your contact is unavailable in a deadline week
• who is liable for a filing error, confirmed in writing
• what the fee includes and what is billed separately

Before quoting, a provider needs to know your entity type, your VAT status, your transaction volume and whether you have employees. A price given without those answers is a guess, and you should expect it to change once the provider has seen your first month of documents.