The 10 Best Audit Firms in Tbilisi

Only if you fall into enterprise category I or II, or you are a public interest entity such as a bank, insurer or listed company. Categories III and IV are released from the audit obligation by the Law on Accounting, Reporting and Auditing. Category III is broadly companies under 10 million GEL in assets, under 20 million GEL in revenue and under 50 employees, and you have to breach at least two of the three tests to move up a category. Most foreign-owned Georgian LLCs never get near that line. Your bank, landlord or foreign parent may still ask for one voluntarily.

No Georgian audit firm publishes a fee schedule, so treat everything here as a range rather than a quote. A first statutory audit of a smaller category II company with clean single-currency books commonly lands somewhere between 6,000 and 15,000 GEL. A mid-tier network firm doing a group reporting package usually quotes higher, roughly 15,000 to 40,000 GEL. A bank, insurer or other public interest entity audited by a Big Four firm runs into six figures in GEL. Get three written quotes with the scope spelled out before you compare numbers.

Usually not. The Big Four are the right answer when a lender covenant, an investor term sheet or a foreign parent's group auditor names one, or when you are a regulated entity that the National Bank supervises. Everyone else is paying a large premium for a logo. Mid-tier network members such as BDO, Grant Thornton, RSM and Baker Tilly hold the same audit registration in Georgia and sign opinions to the same International Standards on Auditing.

SARAS is the Service for Accounting, Reporting and Auditing Supervision, the state body that registers audit firms and collects annual financial statements through its portal. Which statements you file and whether they need an audit opinion attached depends on your enterprise category. For most companies the annual submission deadline is 1 October of the year following the reporting period. Your auditor will normally handle the upload, but the legal obligation sits with the company, not the firm.

No, not for the same entity. Independence rules stop a firm from auditing books it prepared, which is why several firms on this list run audit and outsourcing as separate practices and will not sell you both for one company. In practice you keep your bookkeeper and appoint a separate audit firm. Some groups do use one network for the parent's audit and another for the subsidiaries' accounting, which is fine as long as the entities are distinct.

Appoint before your year end if you can, ideally in the last quarter, so the firm can observe the stock count and agree opening balances. A first-year audit of a small company typically takes four to eight weeks of elapsed time once you hand over a complete trial balance, and repeat years are faster. The bottleneck is almost never the auditor. It is missing contracts, unreconciled intercompany balances and bank statements nobody exported.