SARAS Financial Reporting for Companies in Georgia

Annual financial statements go to SARAS, not to the Revenue Service, and they are not a tax return. Every registered LLC belongs to one of four reporting categories. The category sets the accounting standard and decides whether an audit is needed, and the statements are due by 1 October.

What SARAS Is and Which Law Applies

SARAS stands for the Service for Accounting, Reporting and Auditing Supervision. It is the state body in Georgia that supervises financial reporting and statutory audit, and the duty to file annual financial statements comes from the Law of Georgia on Accounting, Reporting and Auditing, not from the Tax Code.

SARAS is not part of the Revenue Service, and what it receives is not a tax filing. Tax declarations are submitted on rs.ge, a separate portal. A company with every monthly tax declaration filed on time can still be overdue with SARAS, because each obligation is tracked on its own.

Who Has to File Financial Statements With SARAS

Under the law, every LLC, every joint stock company and every branch of a foreign enterprise registered in Georgia counts as an entity. Each registered LLC is assigned to one of four categories, the smallest companies included, and files what its category requires.

Low activity does not remove the obligation. An LLC with one shareholder and next to no transactions is still in a category, because the trigger is the legal form and the size thresholds, not the volume of business in the year. An LLC also keeps full accounts from incorporation whatever its turnover, and LLC accounting on the Business package covers the SARAS filing as well.

An individual entrepreneur only becomes a reporting subject when its assets, revenue and headcount are large enough for Category I, II or III. At Category IV size it has no SARAS obligation at all. In practice that excludes nearly every entrepreneur with Small Business Status, since the ₾500,000 turnover ceiling of the 1% regime is a quarter of Category IV’s ₾2 million revenue limit.

SARAS Reporting Categories and Thresholds

The category is worked out from three figures taken at the end of each financial year: total assets, revenue and the average number of employees.

Category	Total assets	Revenue	Average employees
I (largest)	Over ₾50 million	Over ₾100 million	Over 250
II	Up to ₾50 million	Up to ₾100 million	Up to 250
III	Up to ₾10 million	Up to ₾20 million	Up to 50
IV (smallest)	Up to ₾1 million	Up to ₾2 million	Up to 10

A business belongs to a category when it meets at least two of that category’s three thresholds. Take an LLC with ₾600,000 in total assets, ₾2.4 million in revenue and 6 employees. It is over the Category IV revenue limit but inside the asset and employee limits, so it meets two of the three and is a Category IV entity.

The test is rerun every year and the result governs the following year’s reporting, so a company can end up in a different category without any decision being taken. Among our own clients the usual result is Category III or IV. That holds for a small or medium LLC even when it is comfortably profitable, and Category I is far out of reach.

Public Interest Entities are classified by what they do and not by size: commercial banks, microfinance organisations, insurers, founders of pension schemes, investment funds, credit unions and companies listed on a stock exchange. Whatever their size, they face the strictest reporting and audit rules.

Accounting Standard and Audit Requirement by Category

The category determines two things: the financial reporting standard the statements are prepared under, and whether they have to be audited. What you submit follows from it, namely annual financial statements under your category’s standard, plus a statutory audit of them in the categories that require one.

Category	Accounting standard	Statutory audit
Public Interest Entities and Category I	Full IFRS, mandatory	Generally required
Category II	IFRS for SMEs, or full IFRS by choice	Generally required
Category III	A simplified standard or IFRS for SMEs	Generally not required
Category IV	The simplified standard SARAS publishes for the smallest entities	Generally not required

IFRS, IFRS for SMEs or a Simplified Standard

Full IFRS is written for businesses with complicated financing, group structures or accountability to the public. For a small trading company it is out of proportion, which is why SARAS publishes a separate, simpler standard for Category IV.

The standard for each category is a minimum. Any entity can choose a fuller standard than its category requires, and none can choose a lighter one.

When a Statutory Audit Is Required

An annual statutory audit of the financial statements is generally required for Public Interest Entities and for Categories I and II, in addition to the report itself. Categories III and IV are generally exempt. The exception is an entity that another Georgian law requires to be audited whatever its SARAS category, as can happen when the activity is licensed or when a regulatory rule outside the accounting law applies.

A move from Category III to Category II typically means a heavier standard and, for the first time, a mandatory external audit, which costs considerably more each year than the reporting and takes longer to organise. The new rules generally start with the following reporting year, so a company near the line should be reviewed before the year-end that would push it over, not after.

SARAS Filing Deadline: 1 October

The statements have to reach SARAS by 1 October of the year after the reporting period at the latest. A company that reports on the calendar year has its year-end on 31 December and nine months to file, so the 2026 statements are due by 1 October 2027. Where the financial year is not the calendar year, the nine months run from the entity’s own year-end.

If your category requires an audit, the planning has to start long before October. Auditors need lead time, and an audit squeezed into September leaves you worse placed than one booked months ahead.

How SARAS Reporting Differs From Tax Filing

The legal basis, the deadline and the penalties are all different:

• Tax declarations go to the Revenue Service through rs.ge under the Tax Code. Financial statements go to SARAS under the Law on Accounting, Reporting and Auditing.
• The tax calendar runs on the 15th of every month. SARAS has one date a year, 1 October.
• The thresholds are different numbers. A business that tracks only the ₾100,000 VAT registration line and the ₾500,000 Small Business Status ceiling can change SARAS category without noticing.
• Neither filing counts towards the other.

The annual income tax return is a different filing again: it is an individual’s return, filed with the Revenue Service and due before 1 April, and an ordinary LLC files no annual profit return.

The obligations add up as a business grows. An individual entrepreneur working alone watches one date, the 15th of each month. Once the business becomes an LLC, the SARAS filing is added to everything it already files.

Penalties for a Missed Deadline and How Long to Keep Records

A missed 1 October deadline is a reporting failure, not a tax one. SARAS reporting has its own penalties, separate from the interest and penalties the Revenue Service charges on late tax, and a full year of monthly declarations filed on time gives no protection.

The deadline is usually missed by an LLC that began small, grew, and went on working to the calendar it had at the start. One strong year, a round of hiring or a balance sheet that outgrew what the founders were watching can be enough.

Article 72 of the Tax Code sets the minimum retention period: tax source documents must be kept for at least three years from the end of the calendar year they belong to. A business in a SARAS reporting category should keep its financial statements and the accounting records behind them for longer than that, for as long as the category applies, because an auditor or reviewer can ask for the year a set of statements covers. The same statements and records are often requested during a tax audit as well, although the two filings are legally separate.

If monthly tax filings were missed as well, that is a separate catch-up job: accounting restoration is priced at ₾270 per month of arrears.

SARAS Reporting Prices

Mandatory financial reporting to saras.gov.ge is included in the Business package and in Premium, which contains everything in Business. The work covers the category check, confirming the standard and the audit requirement, and filing the statements by 1 October alongside your monthly tax cycle.

The monthly price follows your transaction count, where one bank statement row, invoice, payment or expense is one transaction:

• Business: ₾315 a month for up to 10 transactions, ₾495 for 11 to 30 and ₾855 for 31 to 60.
• Premium: ₾675, ₾855 and ₾1,305 for the same three bands.
• More than 60 transactions a month is quoted on either package.

Lite does not include SARAS reporting. It covers the mandatory Statistics Service reports, and it is open to LLCs with simple accounting needs that are not registered for VAT, so an LLC on Lite does not have its financial statements covered. Virtual Zone companies, like International Company Status and Free Industrial Zone companies, start on Business, because Lite is not available to them.

Elsewhere in the market the SARAS filing is usually billed on top of the monthly fee, as a separate piece of technical work. On Business and Premium it is part of the package. A statutory audit, where your category requires one, is an external engagement and a separate cost from the reporting itself.

When you compare accounting quotes for an LLC, check whether they include the 1 October filing. All prices are fixed monthly amounts set by transaction volume and exclude 18% VAT.