What Accounting Costs in Bulgaria Actually Depend On

Ask three accounting firms in Sofia to quote for the same company and you can easily get three numbers spanning a factor of three. That is not because two of them are wrong. It is because “the same company” is doing far more work in one description than in another, and because a meaningful part of the fee sits in items that are not always mentioned upfront.

This is what actually moves the number, and how to compare quotes so that you are comparing the same thing.

The three things that set your fee

Almost every foreign owner assumes accounting fees scale with revenue. They mostly do not.

Document volume is the primary driver. An accountant’s monthly work is processing documents: purchase invoices, sales invoices, bank lines, receipts, contracts. A consultancy invoicing four clients a month is genuinely cheap to service regardless of whether it bills a little or a lot. An online retailer with nine hundred small transactions is expensive at any revenue level. Two companies with identical turnover can differ by a factor of five in the work they generate.

VAT registration is the largest single step change. Registration in Bulgaria means monthly returns with full purchase and sales ledgers, plus VIES declarations for intra-EU supplies. That is real recurring work, every month, on a fixed deadline that does not pause when your business is quiet. It roughly doubles the baseline for a small company.

Payroll is priced per person. Each employee generates monthly declarations, contribution calculations and payslips, plus registration filings whenever anything changes. It is charged per head on top of the base fee.

Turnover enters the picture only indirectly, through its correlation with the three above. If a firm quotes you off your revenue figure alone, they have not asked the questions that determine the work.

Why the range is so wide

Beyond the three drivers, two structural things push quotes apart.

English-language service costs more, and legitimately so. Bulgarian-language firms serving domestic clients charge noticeably less than firms working with foreign owners. The gap is not competence. It is that explaining what a notice means, writing a monthly summary someone outside the system can read, and answering questions that a domestic client would never need to ask all take time. A quote that looks unusually cheap is often a firm that will file correctly and explain nothing.

Scope varies more than price. One firm’s monthly fee covers the annual accounts; another’s does not. One monitors your tax office mailbox; another waits for you to forward things. One includes a document allowance; another bills per item from the start. Until you have pinned the scope down, the numbers are not comparable — which is the single most useful reason to insist on a written quote.

The costs that appear later

A quote can be technically accurate and still incomplete. Four items are commonly outside it:

The annual close. Preparing full statements, filing the corporate tax return and publishing in the Commercial Register is separate work with its own deadline. It should be quoted separately, and it should be quoted — not left to surface in June.

Government fees. State, notary and court fees are distinct from professional fees and should be passed through at cost, with the receipt. A firm that marks these up without saying so is worth avoiding on principle.

Volume overage. A plan covering a fixed number of documents will cost more when your business grows. That is fair. It should be stated in the quote rather than discovered on an invoice.

Anything unusual. Tax audits, penalty appeals, restructuring, transfer pricing documentation, catch-up work for unfiled periods. These are genuinely outside a monthly compliance fee. What matters is that they are quoted before the work starts, not billed afterwards.

Why doing it yourself does not work

Occasionally a founder decides to handle Bulgarian accounting personally. The reasoning is understandable: the volume is small, the tax rate is flat, how hard can it be.

The obstacles are practical rather than intellectual. Filings are submitted in Bulgarian through portals designed for people who already know the system. Books must be kept in double entry under Bulgarian standards. Deadlines are enforced automatically, with no reminder and no grace period. And the annual financial statements must be prepared in a statutory format and published where anyone can read them.

The economics settle it. A single late filing penalty generally exceeds several months of professional fees, and a mishandled VAT refund claim can trigger an inspection that costs far more than that in time alone.

What a usable quote looks like

Whoever you engage, the quote should answer five things in writing:

1. The fixed monthly fee.
2. The document volume it covers, and what happens above it.
3. Whether the annual accounts and corporate tax return are included, and if not, what they cost.
4. Whether payroll is included, and the rate per person.
5. What is explicitly excluded.

Any competent Sofia firm can produce that after one short call. If yours needs a lengthy meeting first, or will not put it in writing, that is itself information.

Ours covers monthly bookkeeping and statutory filings, with the annual accounts quoted separately because they are separate work.

If you want that quote for your own company, book a free consultation. Thirty minutes, and you leave with a fixed figure rather than a range.