Bulgaria's annual financial statements: what they are, how to file

What Bulgaria's annual financial statements actually are

The annual financial statements, in Bulgarian ГФО (short for годишен финансов отчет), are the official record of your company's financial position at year end. Unlike the annual tax return, which you file with NAP, Bulgaria's National Revenue Agency, and which reports your taxable profit, the ГФО goes somewhere else entirely: the Commercial Register, Bulgaria's public registry of all companies, where anyone, including a stranger doing due diligence on your business, can look it up for free.

• Balance sheet: a snapshot of assets (what the company owns) and liabilities (what it owes) as of 31 December.
• Income statement: how much the company earned and spent during the year, and the resulting profit or loss.
• Notes: a short explanation of the accounting policies and the more significant figures behind the balance sheet.

A bank, a future investor, a potential partner, or a counterparty on a public tender can pull up your ГФО directly from the Commercial Register without ever asking you for it. Publishing it is not a formality between you and the state alone, it is something that builds, or damages, your company's public credibility.

Who must publish, and the 30 September deadline

The obligation applies to practically every registered company: EOOD and OOD (limited-liability companies), AD and EAD (joint-stock companies), cooperatives, and sole traders subject to mandatory independent audit. Non-profit legal entities file their statements in a separate register, on the same principle.

• Deadline: 30 September of the year following the reporting year. Statements for 2025 must be published no later than 30 September 2026.
• Publishing is a separate step from filing the annual tax return in June. The two do not merge automatically, even if you filed everything on time in the spring.
• Alongside the statements themselves, you file the owner's or shareholders' resolution approving them, a truthfulness declaration under the Commercial Register Act, and a power of attorney if you are not filing in person.
• Filing happens either in person with a qualified electronic signature, or through an accountant or lawyer holding explicit power of attorney.

A fact many owners don't know: since 1 January 2022, there is no state fee for publishing the ГФО in the Commercial Register. Before that, it cost roughly 10 to 20 euro depending on how you filed, but the fee was scrapped entirely, for trading companies and non-profits alike. You only pay if you use a paid accountant or lawyer to file it for you.

Micro and small companies: a lighter version of the report

Not every company files the same size of ГФО. The Accountancy Act sorts companies into size categories based on assets, revenue, and headcount, and smaller companies get a shorter, simplified format.

• Microenterprise: balance sheet assets under roughly 460,000 euro, net sales revenue under roughly 920,000 euro, average staff of 10 or fewer for the year. You only need to stay under two of these three thresholds.
• Small company: assets under roughly 5.1 million euro, revenue under roughly 10.2 million euro, up to 50 staff.
• A microenterprise can publish just an abbreviated balance sheet and abbreviated income statement, and if it is not subject to mandatory audit, it can skip the management report and keep the notes minimal.
• A small company publishes an abbreviated balance sheet, abbreviated income statement, and notes, but typically without a full cash-flow statement or statement of changes in equity.

For the practical owner of an EOOD or a small OOD, this means one thing: you almost certainly fall into the lighter regime. The statements you need to prepare, usually with an accountant's help, are a genuinely short document, not twenty pages of disclosures.

The NSI report: the other spring filing

Alongside the tax return, and months before you actually publish the ГФО, every company also files an annual activity report with NSI, the National Statistical Institute: a statistical summary of turnover, assets, staff, and business structure. It is not a tax document and does not go to the Commercial Register, but it is mandatory and has its own deadline.

• The filing window matches the annual tax return: 1 March to 30 June of the current year, for the previous one.
• It is filed electronically through NSI's own information system, separately from the Commercial Register filing for the ГФО.
• Microenterprises usually fill in a shorter form, but the obligation to file still stands.

In short: by 30 June you have two separate filings, the tax return and the NSI report, and by 30 September a third, going to a different authority for a different reason, the ГФО in the Commercial Register. It is easy to mix these up precisely because they land within the same six months.

The exception: dormant companies file a declaration instead

If your company had no operations at all during the year, meaning no revenue and no expenses tied to any business activity, the law does not require a ГФО. Instead, you file a one-time no-activity declaration. Many foreign founders end up in exactly this position: a company registered to buy property, or kept open on standby, with no invoices either way.

• The declaration is filed in the Commercial Register by 30 June, not 30 September.
• It is filed once, for the first year with no activity. Unless the status changes, you do not refile it every following year.
• No state fee applies.
• The moment the company resumes activity, you owe a full ГФО again, for the year activity resumes and every year after, under the normal rules.

Be careful with the shortcut logic of "the company isn't doing anything, so I have no obligations." Even minor bank fees or interest earned on the account can count as activity and knock you out of the exemption, so check your actual status before assuming it applies.

You don't need to track all of this yourself

ГФО, the no-activity declaration, the NSI report: three separate filings, three separate authorities, all landing within a six-month window. It is easy to lose track of which one is due when, especially if you are running the company from abroad and the reminders arrive in Bulgarian.

Useful next reads:

What annual closing looks like with FreeMe.bg
How VAT and tax filing will work with FreeMe.bg
Bulgaria's tax calendar: every deadline your company owes, in one place

FreeMe.bg tracks every one of these deadlines for you, including 30 September for the ГФО. If we miss one, the fine is ours, not yours. Log in with your Google account and leave the missed deadlines to us.