What a Warsaw Accounting Office Actually Does for a Foreign-Owned Company
Searching for an accounting office in Warsaw is easy. Working out what you are actually buying is not, because almost every firm’s website says the same four words — bookkeeping, payroll, tax, advisory — and none of them tells you what lands in your inbox in an ordinary month.
So here is the ordinary month, in order.
What happens between the 1st and the 25th
You send documents. Sales invoices, purchase invoices, bank statements, anything unusual. Most clients send continuously rather than in one batch; it makes the close faster and the questions smaller.
We enter and classify them. This is the part clients imagine is the whole job. It is perhaps a third of it. The judgement is not in typing the numbers but in deciding what each document is: whether a cost is deductible, whether VAT can be reclaimed, whether an expense is a fixed asset that must be depreciated instead.
We reconcile. Bank against ledger, receivables against sales, payables against purchases. This is where errors surface — a duplicated invoice, a payment against the wrong document, a missing statement page.
We ask you about what does not fit. A good month has two or three questions. A bad month has twenty, and almost always because documents arrived without context.
We file and tell you what to pay. The JPK_V7 file and the VAT payment fall on the 25th. Income tax advances and ZUS fall on the 20th. You should receive the amounts and the account numbers with enough time to pay them, not on the deadline.
What happens once a year
Preparation of the annual financial statements within three months of the year end. Shareholder approval within six. Filing with the KRS repository within fifteen days of that approval. CIT-8 alongside. For a calendar-year company that means a concentrated period from January to June, and the work is materially easier if the monthly closes were clean.
What is not bookkeeping, and is usually charged separately
It is worth knowing where the line normally falls, because a quoted monthly fee rarely includes everything:
- Payroll is a separate discipline with its own deadlines, and is usually priced per employee.
- Company formation and KRS changes are one-off work.
- Representation before the tax office — responding to an inquiry, an audit, a VAT verification — is not routine bookkeeping.
- Advisory — choosing a tax form, structuring a transaction, deciding whether to register for VAT early — is advice, and good advice is worth paying for separately rather than getting for free and badly.
The questions actually worth asking a Warsaw accounting office
Who will do my books, and can I speak to them? In a small office you deal with the person doing the work. In a large one you may deal with an account manager who relays questions. Neither is wrong; knowing which you are buying matters.
What language will we work in? Not just for meetings — for the questions that arrive mid-month about a specific invoice. A firm that speaks your language for sales and Polish for everything else has not solved the problem.
How do I send documents, and how do I see what you have done? Client portals vary from excellent to a shared inbox. Ask to see it before you sign.
Who is liable, and are they insured? Accounting offices in Poland carry mandatory civil liability insurance for bookkeeping services. Ask for the policy.
What happens if I leave? The answer should be immediate and specific: your books are yours, and the handover format should be agreed before you need it.
What a foreign-owned company needs that a Polish one does not
Three things, consistently:
A board member who can sign electronically. Polish statutory accounts are filed electronically. At least one board member needs a qualified electronic signature recognised under eIDAS or a Profil Zaufany. This is discovered late with tiresome regularity.
Intercompany substance. Management fees, licence fees and loans from a parent need agreements, not just invoices, and above certain thresholds they need transfer-pricing documentation.
Someone who will tell you the Polish answer, not the translated one. The most expensive mistakes we see come from applying a home-country assumption to a Polish rule that looks similar and is not.
Where we are, and who we work with
We are a Warsaw accounting office working with foreign founders and foreign-owned companies, in Polish, English, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic and Romanian. Most of our clients have never had a Polish company before, and a fair number have never been to Poland.
If you want to compare what you are paying for now against what you should be getting, send us a month’s worth of documents and we will tell you plainly what we see.
Frequently asked questions
- What does an accounting office in Warsaw actually do each month?
- Enters and classifies your sales and purchase documents, reconciles the ledger against your bank, resolves anything that does not fit, then files the monthly VAT return (JPK_V7) and tells you what to pay. VAT falls due on the 25th; income tax advances and ZUS contributions on the 20th. The classification judgement — deductible or not, reclaimable VAT or not, expense or fixed asset — is the substance of the work, not the data entry.
- Is payroll included in a bookkeeping fee?
- Usually not. Payroll is a separate discipline with its own filings and deadlines and is normally priced per employee, alongside the bookkeeping fee. The same is true of company formation, KRS change filings, representation before the tax office, and advisory work. Ask what a quoted monthly figure covers before comparing two offices.
- Can I work with a Polish accounting office in English?
- Some offer it, but check what it covers. Meetings in English and mid-month questions in Polish is a common arrangement and not a workable one, because the questions that matter arrive as a message about one specific invoice. Ask which language the day-to-day correspondence will be in, not just the meetings.
- Are accounting offices in Poland insured?
- Firms providing bookkeeping services are required to carry civil liability insurance for that activity. It is reasonable to ask to see the policy before engaging, and a firm that hesitates is telling you something.
- What do I need if my company is foreign-owned?
- Three things beyond ordinary bookkeeping: a board member holding an electronic signature Poland accepts, so the annual accounts can actually be filed; proper agreements behind any intercompany charges, with transfer-pricing documentation above the relevant thresholds; and an adviser who gives you the Polish answer rather than a translation of your home-country assumption.