Accounting Restoration in Georgia

Accounting restoration is what the Georgian market calls putting a business back in order with the Revenue Service. Missed declarations are filed month by month, declarations that went in wrong are corrected, and the records behind them are collected in one place. It can start with a change of accountant, and it ends when the next monthly declaration goes in on time.

What Accounting Restoration Is and When You Need It

Individual entrepreneurs with Small Business Status, LLCs and VAT-registered businesses in Georgia owe a monthly declaration by the 15th of the following month, with no exception for a month without income. Restoration is needed when that cycle has broken somewhere. The usual cases:

• zero declarations skipped because nothing was earned that month
• months never filed at all, after a slow season, time abroad or a gap between contracts
• declarations filed with a wrong figure or for the wrong reporting month
• an accountant who stopped filing or stopped answering
• invoices, contracts and bank statements that were never kept
• a business that stopped trading and was never formally closed

The filing obligation runs until the business is formally deregistered or liquidated. A business that stopped trading two years ago without being closed is two years behind on declarations.

What is missing depends on what the business is registered for. An LLC files a corporate tax declaration every month, including months with no distribution and nothing owed. A VAT-registered business owes a separate VAT declaration on top of its income or corporate one, and an employer owes payroll and pension declarations for the same months. The annual income tax return is due before 1 April for income not already declared monthly or taxed at source.

Penalties for Late and Incorrect Tax Declarations in Georgia

Late filing and underpayment fall under the general penalty rules of the Tax Code of Georgia:

• Penalties for a late declaration apply automatically once the 15th has passed. There is no grace period, whatever the reason.
• Late filing and late payment are penalised separately.
• Interest accrues daily on any unpaid balance, from the deadline until it is settled.
• Understating the tax due in a declaration carries its own penalty on top of the shortfall.
• A skipped zero declaration accrues a penalty the same way a late declaration for a busy month does.

These penalties are not discretionary, and they keep accruing for as long as the position stays unresolved. A single missed zero declaration caught quickly is a small problem to fix, and missed declarations across several months or several obligations are a considerably larger one.

Missed or incorrect filings do not, by themselves, revoke Small Business Status, which is lost by exceeding the ₾500,000 turnover ceiling two years running.

How to File Missed Declarations and Amend Wrong Ones

Missed months are filed one by one. Each gets its own declaration through rs.ge for the reporting month it belongs to, including the months where the figure is zero.

Three rules apply to each one:

• Foreign income is converted to lari at the National Bank of Georgia’s official rate on the date each payment landed, not the invoice date and not a monthly average.
• Services bought from outside Georgia carry 18% reverse VAT, declared by the buyer even without a VAT registration.
• Filing and paying are separate actions. The payment is made in lari from a Georgian bank account, under the single treasury code 101001000.

A declaration that was already submitted can be corrected. The most common filing errors are ordinary ones: a wrong reporting month selected, a currency conversion done at the wrong date’s rate, or a declaration submitted without the payment following it. A payment that was sent but does not show as received usually traces back to a payer name or tax ID entered at the bank differently from the registered one.

Correct an error yourself before the Revenue Service finds it. The sooner a wrong figure is corrected, the smaller the interest and penalty exposure tends to be.

Documents Required for Accounting Restoration

Each missing month is prepared from that month’s own documents:

• invoices issued and invoices received
• bank statements showing when each payment landed and in which currency
• contracts with clients and service providers
• receipts for cash expenses
• proof of tax residency, where a tax treaty applies
• your rs.ge login

How much has to be put in order depends on the type of business. An individual entrepreneur with Small Business Status and no VAT obligation is not required to keep formal accounts, only the tax source documents themselves. An LLC keeps full accounts from incorporation, regardless of turnover.

The documents themselves cannot be written afterwards. Article 72 of the Tax Code requires a tax source document to be dated and made in at least two identical copies at the time of the transaction, not assembled later from memory or from a bank statement alone. The second copy belongs to the other party, so an invoice missing from your files should still exist on your client’s or supplier’s side.

How Far Back the Revenue Service Can Audit and How Long to Keep Records

The ordinary statute of limitations for a tax assessment in Georgia is three years. That is the reach-back period an audit can use against a filing you already consider closed.

Tax source documents are kept for at least three years after the end of the calendar year they relate to, so an invoice issued in March 2026 has to survive until the end of 2029, whether or not the business is still trading.

Document	What it shows	Minimum retention
Invoices and receipts	Both parties, the date, what was supplied and its value	3 years from year-end
Contracts and engagement terms	The agreement behind each invoice	Alongside the invoices they support
Bank statements and payment confirmations	When each payment landed and in which currency	3 years from year-end, longer if disputed
Accounting records behind SARAS statements	The year the financial statements describe	Beyond 3 years, for as long as the reporting category applies

Three years is the minimum retention period. Companies that file annual financial statements with SARAS should hold their records longer, and a year the Revenue Service has already questioned stays open until the matter is resolved.

How Missed Declarations Affect Bank Accounts, LLC Conversion, Business Closure and Tax Audits

Outstanding tax debt and an inconsistent filing history tend to surface at four moments:

• Opening a business bank account. The bank asks for a clean filing history.
• Converting to an LLC. There is no direct conversion from individual entrepreneur to LLC. The new company is registered and the old registration is formally closed, and termination does not excuse a declaration that was already due.
• Closing the business. The registry will not finalise an LLC liquidation, and is unlikely to process a clean termination of an individual entrepreneur, while the Revenue Service shows an unresolved position.
• A tax audit. A pattern of late or missing declarations, especially skipped zero declarations, is one of the mismatches the Revenue Service’s system is built to surface.

The law targets four months for an LLC liquidation from the date it is registered. A tax audit running alongside it moves that deadline to one month after the registry is told the audit has concluded.

An audit usually starts as a letter. A discrepancy left unresolved at that stage is one of the more common reasons a field audit follows, held at your place of business after at least 10 working days’ written notice and running around three months, with a possible extension of two more.

How to Change Accountants in Georgia: Step by Step

Changing accountants is routine and follows the same five steps every time:

1. Your current accountant releases the rs.ge access before the new one takes over anything. The credentials and the records are yours.
2. We take over the access and read through what was filed.
3. We tell you which months are missing and what needs correcting, before the first month is ours.
4. The gaps are closed: missed months are filed and wrong declarations corrected.
5. Monthly filing resumes on a package, with the next declaration in before the 15th.

Most switches complete within 1 to 2 weeks. If the rs.ge login itself has been lost, it can be recovered, but that generally takes a formal request or a visit, not an online reset.

Do not skip the review of past filings. An error inherited from a previous accountant is still your liability with the Revenue Service, whoever made it.

Raise a single missed deadline with your accountant directly before changing. Repeated problems are a reason to change: reverse VAT missed again after you raised it, vague or delayed answers to written questions, a SARAS deadline or a VAT threshold that arrives as a surprise, or an accountant who cannot be reached in a deadline week.

Accounting Restoration Prices

Missed months are priced one by one, at ₾270 per month of arrears. Six missed months cost ₾1,620, and you know the total before any work starts.

Work	Price	When it applies
Missed declarations	₾270 per month of arrears	Each month that was never filed
Lite package	₾180, ₾315 or ₾495 a month	Ongoing filing for a business not registered for VAT, first quarter paid upfront
Business package	₾315, ₾495 or ₾855 a month	Ongoing filing with VAT, employees or a Virtual Zone, ICS or FIZ company

The three package prices are for up to 10, 11 to 30 and 31 to 60 transactions a month, where a transaction is one bank statement row, invoice, payment or expense. More than 60 is quoted, and all prices exclude 18% VAT.

The fee covers our work. Tax, interest and penalties for the missed months are paid by you to the Revenue Service, and we tell you the amount and where it goes.

Once the history is current, the business moves onto one of the monthly packages, each of which includes the annual tax return where one is due, management of your rs.ge access and liability for any filing error we make.