Accounting for a small Bulgarian company: why it feels so hard

The market today: one company, one accountant, one monthly fee

Register a company in Bulgaria and the first advice you hear is always the same: “find yourself an accountant.” The market is made of thousands of small practices, each with a handful of clients, personal relationships and its own way of working. Communication runs over email and phone, documents travel in folders or as quick photos in a chat app. The price is a monthly retainer that rarely reflects how much work actually exists. For a company issuing one or two invoices a month, offers commonly start around €100 and climb as soon as VAT registration appears, often before you fully understand what that monthly fee is supposed to cover in the first place.

For a foreign founder there is an extra twist: the market runs in Bulgarian. Your realistic options are an expensive English-speaking firm aimed at corporate clients, or a local accountant you can only half-talk to through translation apps and patient goodwill. Neither was built for a one-person company, a freelancer invoicing a handful of overseas clients, or a family holding a single rental property through a company just to simplify the tax treatment. You end up paying corporate-level prices, or corporate-level confusion, for what is genuinely a very small amount of bookkeeping.

What your company actually owes the state

The 10% corporate tax is the easy part. The real product of Bulgarian compliance is a calendar of obligations that nobody hands you at incorporation, and that rarely shows up in the marketing that convinced you to register a company here in the first place:

• Double-entry bookkeeping under the Accountancy Act: every document gets booked, no matter whether it is a €20 receipt or a €2,000 invoice, and it has to stay traceable at any time.
• If the company is VAT-registered: a monthly VAT return and ledgers filed with the NRA (the national revenue agency) by the 14th of the following month, even when the result is zero and you owe nothing at all. A missed zero-return is penalized just like a missed return with real tax due.
• An annual corporate tax return by 30 June, regardless of how small the profit was.
• Publication of the annual financial statements in the Commercial Register by 30 September, which is public and often checked by partners, landlords and banks.
• An annual activity report to the national statistics institute, which applies even to a company with zero employees.
• And a company with no activity at all still owes a declaration saying exactly that, rather than simply staying quiet.

Every missed deadline means a fine, and sometimes interest on top. The mandatory VAT registration threshold is €51,130 of annual turnover, but if you work with EU clients or suppliers, a registration is often required much earlier, sometimes before your very first invoice. This is where most new founders get caught out: they assume the threshold applies universally, when in reality it depends heavily on who you are actually trading with.

Why the information is so hard to find

The rules live across several laws: the VAT Act, the Corporate Income Tax Act, the Accountancy Act, and dozens of regulations underneath them. Each law covers a different slice of the question and rarely points clearly to the others. They are written in Bulgarian, for accountants, and official translations lag years behind, if they exist at all. They also keep moving: in 2026 alone, the euro changeover reshuffled thresholds, amounts and forms, and almost nobody received a clear, personalized summary of what actually changed for their specific situation.

A real-life example: “Can I buy a laptop through the company?” A simple question that touches expense deductibility, VAT and depreciation at once, which means three separate topics with three separate answers. The answer hides in three different laws, and online you will find “of course,” “absolutely not” and “it depends,” without an explanation of what it depends on. For someone without an accounting degree, that is not information. It is a maze, and every forum thread or blog post seems to point you in a slightly different direction.

So where does that leave you? Bulgarian forums with contradictory answers from different years, some written before the currency changeover itself. Expat Facebook groups where every thread ends in “ask an accountant,” without saying which one or how to even start that conversation. Official sites that explain what the law says, but not what you should do on Tuesday when an invoice lands in your inbox and you are not sure whether to book it right away. Accountants who know the answer, but whose time is expensive and already booked with other clients. The result is familiar: people either pay “for peace of mind” without knowing what they are getting for their money, or postpone starting a company altogether, afraid of the next unclear question. Fear of paperwork kills business ideas before they begin.

The bill that does not add up

A company with two invoices and five expenses a month generates an hour or two of real accounting work. It pays for a full day, because the retainer does not ask how many documents you actually brought in that month. Then come the extras: a “13th fee” for the annual closing (it is common practice for year-end to cost one extra monthly fee), per-document charges above a quota, a fee if you get inspected by the tax authority or social security. Each extra sounds reasonable on its own, but added together, they make the real annual cost hard to predict up front. And dormant companies, including the very common “one company per property” setups, often pay a year-round retainer so that someone files a single declaration saying the company did nothing all year. For an owner who paused activity temporarily, paying full price for silence feels particularly unfair.

To be fair: the accountants are not the villains. Their model is manual: a person reads documents, types them into a system, tracks deadlines in a calendar or a notebook, answers the phone when a client has an urgent question. Manual work cannot get meaningfully cheaper beyond a certain point, because a person's time is finite. It can only be replaced where a machine does it better, faster, and without ever missing a line in the ledger.

What technology changes (and what it cannot)

Most of a small company's accounting is repetitive and automatable: reading invoices and receipts, booking them by rules, assembling ledgers and returns, tracking deadlines and flagging them before they are missed. Software does this fast, cheaply and without getting tired, and it never forgets to double-check a document just because it is Friday afternoon. These are exactly the tasks that eat up most of a traditional accountant's time, and exactly the ones that automate most easily, because they follow clear, repeatable rules rather than judgment calls.

But there is one thing automation alone does not solve: filing and accountability. Returns are filed with the tax authority under a qualified electronic signature, and someone has to stand behind the numbers with their name in front of the institutions involved. Software can propose the most likely correct answer, but it cannot carry legal responsibility on anyone's behalf. That is why we believe the future is not “software instead of an accountant,” but software that does the grunt work: reading documents, populating ledgers, calculating totals, plus a certified accountant who reviews the result and files it. Machines do the math. Humans answer for it.

How we plan to help

We are building FreeMe.bg around exactly this hybrid model: an app where invoices and expenses are booked automatically, while certified accountants review and file your declarations with the tax authority. Pricing follows real activity: a dormant company does not pay like a working one, and a company with more documents pays more, instead of being locked into the same flat package as everyone else. Questions get answered in a chat, in English or Bulgarian, instead of after three phone calls and waiting for someone to pick up. And the help starts on day one: from forming the company to its first filing, with no gap where you are left alone with your questions.

If this is your situation, here is where to go next:

How Bulgarian company formation works, step by step
How VAT and tax filing will work in FreeMe.bg
When you need an expert and what is included

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