What the Romanian year end consists of
The annual financial statements are the point at which twelve months of bookkeeping become a public document. In Romania they are prepared under the accounting regulations approved by OMFP 1802/2014, in application of the Accounting Law 82/1991, and filed electronically with ANAF. For companies applying those regulations, the file is submitted under form code S1001.
The framework is national, not international. IFRS applies to defined categories of entities — principally companies whose securities are admitted to trading on a regulated market, and certain regulated sectors. Every other Romanian company, including the subsidiary of a group that reports under IFRS worldwide, prepares Romanian statutory accounts under the national regulations. In practice that means a group subsidiary produces two sets of numbers from one ledger, and the year-end work is largely the reconciliation between them.
A second characteristic surprises foreign owners: the statements are public. Once filed, they are accessible to anyone — banks, customers, competitors, prospective buyers. A company that has not filed is equally visible.
What goes into the file
The complete submission is more than a balance sheet:
- the balance sheet, in the format prescribed by the regulations for the entity’s size category;
- the profit and loss account;
- explanatory notes, whose extent depends on the size category — micro-entities file a reduced set, larger entities a fuller one;
- the administrators’ report, where required for the category;
- the shareholders’ resolution approving the statements;
- the declaration of responsibility signed by the administrator and the person responsible for the accounting records;
- the statutory auditor’s report, where the entity is audited;
- for the same period, the asset register section of the SAF-T file, which is reported annually rather than monthly.
The size category — micro-entity, small, medium or large — is not cosmetic. It determines the format of the balance sheet, how many notes are required, whether an administrators’ report is needed and, at the top end, whether an audit is required.
- 31 Dec.The year closesFor a financial year that follows the calendar year.
- Jan.–Feb.Stocktake and adjustmentsThe mandatory inventory, impairments, provisions, exchange differences, the final tax charge.
- before filingApproval by the shareholdersThe financial statements are approved by the shareholders before they are filed.
- 150 daysFilingThe deadline falls at the end of May. The SAF-T asset register goes in at the same time.
Non-profit entities have 120 days, and entities with no activity file a declaration of inactivity within 60 days (Accounting Law no. 82/1991, art. 36).
Deadlines
For companies, the statements are filed within 150 days of the end of the financial year. Where the financial year is the calendar year, that places the deadline at the end of May.
Entities that carried out no activity during the year do not file a full set of statements; they file a declaration to that effect, within a shorter deadline set for that purpose. The obligation does not disappear with the activity.
Two related deadlines sit near the same period and are regularly confused with this one:
- the annual corporate income tax return, which computes the tax base rather than presenting the accounting result, and follows its own deadline;
- the annual SAF-T asset register, submitted by the financial statements deadline.
Because the exact dates are set in the Accounting Law and are occasionally adjusted, and because the corporate tax deadline has moved in recent years, we confirm all of them against the calendar in force for the year concerned. The recurring map is in the Romanian tax calendar.
Audit: when it becomes mandatory
Statutory audit is triggered by size, measured over two consecutive financial years. The accounting regulations set three criteria — total assets, net turnover and the average number of employees — and an entity that exceeds two of the three for two consecutive years enters the audit population. The obligation then continues until the entity falls below the criteria on the same two-year basis.
The threshold values are set by order of the Ministry of Finance and have been revised over time, including as EU size criteria were updated. We do not quote a figure here that might be out of date by the time you read it: we check the values in force for your financial year and tell you, before the year end, whether you are entering the audit population. That warning matters because appointing an auditor after the year has closed is both harder and more expensive than appointing one in November.
Certain entities are audited regardless of size, under sector-specific legislation. Groups also frequently require an audit contractually, independently of the Romanian threshold.
Penalties
Failure to prepare or to file the annual financial statements within the deadline is sanctioned under the Accounting Law 82/1991, with amounts set in bands according to the length of the delay. The consolidated text is on legislatie.just.ro.
The indirect consequences are usually more expensive than the fine. Because the statements are public, a missing filing is visible to any counterparty that looks. Banks and lessors treat it as a credit signal. Repeated failure to file is among the grounds on which a company can be struck off the trade register. And an entity that has not filed cannot easily prove its position in a tender, a due diligence or a financing round.
How we prepare your year end
Before the year closes. In the last quarter we run a pre-close review: reconciliations of receivables, payables, inventory, intercompany balances and VAT accounts; the fixed asset register and depreciation; provisions and accruals; and a check on whether the audit criteria are about to be met. Problems found in November are cheap; the same problems found in May are not.
At the close. We prepare the statutory statements in the format required for your size category, together with the notes, the administrators’ report and the approval documentation. Where you report to a parent under IFRS or another framework, we produce and document the bridge between the two results, so the group and the statutory numbers can be explained to anyone who asks.
Reconciliation against what was already declared. The accounting result has to agree with the VAT returns, the D394 domestic transactions return and the SAF-T files for the year. This is the step most often skipped, and it is the first one a tax inspection performs.
Filing and follow-through. We submit the file to ANAF within the deadline with our qualified digital certificate under written mandate, prepare the annual tax return in parallel, and deliver the whole set to you in English with a commentary on the year.
Where we also run the monthly accounting and payroll, the year end is a short exercise rather than a project, because the reconciliations have been done every month. Where an audit applies, we handle the auditor’s requests directly.
The errors we see most often
- The statutory result never reconciled to the group result, so nobody can explain the difference when a buyer or a bank asks.
- A dormant company filing nothing, on the assumption that no activity means no obligation.
- Audit criteria met quietly, discovered after the year end, when appointing an auditor is a scramble.
- Prior-period errors pushed through the current year result instead of being recognised as the regulations require.
- Notes and the administrators’ report omitted for a size category that requires them, producing an incomplete filing that has to be resubmitted.
- The annual tax return prepared from a different version of the trial balance than the financial statements.
