Submit Annual Report for Estonian Company

Every Estonian company has to submit an annual report to the Estonian Business Register. This report is an overview of your company’s financial activities in its previous financial year. All citizens, residents, and e-residents of Estonia that own companies are subject to the same rules, although the reports are simplified for micro and small enterprises.

What I am going to describe is solely for my verified startup business BizHive OÜ in Estonia. We provide customize SaaS based software solutions all over the world. You can find out the link above to know more about our business and how we can help your business as well.

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You can follow the same to submit an annual report if you do not have any business activity or less. If you are not confident enough then you should contact any Estonian accountant who is an expert on this matter. I am going to show you how to submit the Annual Report by yourself.

According to the Estonian Commercial Code, the annual report must be submitted within six months of your company’s financial year ending. For most Estonian companies financial year is defined in their Articles of Association as being from 1 January to 31 December. That’s the default and the simplest way to do it (and we like to keep everything simple here).

So if your company’s accounting year ending with 31 December then the annual report deadline would ordinarily be 30 June.

As I already mentioned that if your company did not make any economic activity or sales. Then you can easily follow steps and save up to 100 EURO as per the current rate [2020] of an accountant to submit a 0 sales Annual Report.

A microbusiness is defined in law as a one-person company with assets less than €175,000 and an annual taxable turnover in a single financial year of up to €50,000. A small enterprise, meanwhile, can have two out of three for the following: Assets up to €4 million, an annual turnover up to €8 million, and up to 50 salaried employees in the financial year. You can get more details here.

Steps to be followed

Step 1. Log in to the Estonian Business Register

You will need to use that link above, which is the same one you can use to register a company, register share capital, or alter your Articles of Association. It’s a bit confusing because there’s another way to log into the Business Register to access company data so make sure you are entering from the right place. You will need to use your Estonian digital ID to log in. Note that Smart-ID does not yet work for signing annual accounts.

Step 2. Add new report

Click on the blue tab that says ‘Annual reports’ then click on the lower tab that says ‘Reports to be submitted’. You can then click the blue button for ‘Add new report’. You will then see a dropdown menu where you can select the company you are submitting an annual report for.

Step 3. Defining the report

The date that this report covers should already be selected as from 1 January to 31 December of the previous year. However, if this is your first annual report then you need to put the date that the company was founded, which might be later if you established it before the end of June or earlier the previous year if you started it after the start of July.

Click also on ‘Type of report’ then select ‘Annual report’. More options will now appear, some of them confusingly in Estonian even if you are going through the process in English. The only additional thing you need to change is to select ‘yes’ where it asks if the report should be compiled also in English.

Step 4. Filling in reporting forms

The next screen is called ‘General view of the report’ on which we need to change a few things, first by clicking the blue button that says ‘Filling in reporting forms’. On the next page from that, we just need to tick two extra boxes before clicking save.

We need to add two mandatory forms under the ‘Main reports’ section so click the first box that says ‘Statement of financial position’ and also the third box that says ‘Income statement (scheme 1)’. In English, those are more commonly known as a balance sheet and a profit and loss statement.

Main reports

You will next get the opportunity to fill those out. Click the blue ‘Enter’ button next to them, starting with the one called ‘Statement of Financial position’.

That will open up a complicated-looking form where you can enter lots of numbers. All you need to do though is enter ‘0’ as your equity for both the start and end date, enter ‘2500’ as your issued share capital for the start and end date, and also ‘-2500’ as your unpaid capital on the balance start and end date. That’s assuming you’ve used the standard minimum share capital of €2,500 when starting your company. You don’t need to enter anything under assets or liabilities.

Finally, for this section, click ‘Save and calculate totals’. If everything is correct, the totals will calculate, there will be no error messages, and you can then click ‘Back to the view of reporting forms’.

Now let’s do the profit and loss statement. Click the blue ‘Enter’ button next to that and you’ll find another complicated-looking form. This is even simpler though. Just write ‘0’ in that first box next to ‘Revenue’ then click ‘Save and calculate totals’.

Ok. We’ve completed this section so now click ‘Back to the view of reporting forms’.

Notes

This will actually take you to an additional section after ‘Main reports’, which is called ‘Notes’. Here, there are three mandatory notes that need to be submitted: ‘Accounting policies’, ‘Labor expense’ and ‘Related party [transactions]’. Click that blue enter button to open them, starting with ‘Accounting policies’.

‘Accounting policies’ is really simple. You just select ‘Yes’ from that dropdown menu then ‘Back to the view of reporting forms’. The question you are answering has actually been mistranslated in English (which we’ve reported), but it’s supposed to be asking if your company is still active.

Now let’s do ‘Labour expense’. Here you literally do nothing. Just click ‘Save’ then ‘Back to the view of reporting forms’.

Finally, ‘Related parties’. Here you need to insert ‘2500’ under ‘Receivables’ at both the end and start date. (Again, that’s if your company has the minimum share capital of €2,500). Then click ‘Save and display general view’.

Step 5: Clarify the company isn’t operating

You are now back in the main section and have all the mandatory report forms completed. You can’t proceed to the next step though without clarifying that lack of revenue. The state wants to know whether you just haven’t made any sales or whether you haven’t been operating at all. So click ‘Enter the breakdown of sales revenue’.

If you haven’t been operating at all (which is the only reason I think we should be completing this ourselves in case I haven’t made that clear), then click ‘No economic activity was performed’. Then click ‘Back to the main view of the report’.

Step 6: Reviewing the report

You can now click ‘Continue to the next step’. On the next page, first, click that button that says ‘Generate the final PDF in Estonian and English’. Then also tick the box that says you give access to Statistics Office of Estonia. My colleague saw this tickbox written in Estonian (even on the English side), while I saw it in English. Either way, it’s the only tickbox on the page. You can then click ‘Send the report to signing’.

On the next page, you need to click to enter the date the report was completed before clicking ‘save’. Then you can click the blue button to ‘Add a digital signature to the report’. After using your Estonian digital ID to enter a digital signature, click the blue button for ‘Continue to the next step’.

There you have to show ‘Profit distribution Proposal’. Where you need to share the details of how you want to distribute profit. In this case, profit is 0 so put all 0.

Step 7: Submit your annual report

You are not ready to download the signed report in Estonian and English then submit it to the Estonian Business Register. When the submission is successfully received you should get an email confirmation.

That’s your annual report done! Congratulations.

Thanks for reading

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