The monthly declaration on RS.ge takes fifteen minutes once you have done it twice, and the version of this job that costs people money is not the filing — it is forgetting that an empty month still has to be filed. While your registration is live you declare every month, turnover or no turnover. The deadline I have filed against since I registered is the 15th of the month following the reporting month, and it is the deadline every accounting practice in this city publishes.

The rest of this post is what goes in the box, what does not, and what actually happens when a month gets away from you — which is less dramatic than the agency pages imply and more annoying than doing it on time.

Checked on 4 September 2026. Confirm the current deadline and any penalty figure on rs.ge rather than here; a filing rule is exactly the sort of thing that changes without anyone telling the blogs.

What you are filing, and what it is not

Small business status taxes turnover, not profit. That is the sentence to internalise before your first declaration, because it removes an entire category of work you might otherwise think you have to do.

You are not filing accounts. You are not deducting your rent, your laptop, your coworking membership or the flight you took to see a client. There is no expenses column to fill in and no receipts to keep for the purpose of this particular filing. You are stating the gross amount that came in for your registered activity during the month, and 1% of it is the tax.

PwC’s Worldwide Tax Summaries for Georgia, last reviewed 2 September 2026, states the regime as 1% on turnover below 500,000 GEL a year and 3% above it. The declaration is where that number gets reported.

The nil return

If you invoiced nothing in August, you file a declaration for August saying so.

This catches almost everyone once. The reasoning that leads to skipping it is entirely natural — no income, no tax, nothing to report — and it is wrong, because the obligation attaches to the registration rather than to the money. A dormant Individual Entrepreneur is still an Individual Entrepreneur, and the filing history is what the Revenue Service sees.

Two consequences follow. First, if you register before you have work, you have created a monthly obligation immediately, empty or not — which is the argument for registering the week you need it rather than the week you arrive. Second, if you are genuinely done working here, the answer is to close the registration properly rather than to stop filing. Closing an IE is the post for that, and stopping quietly is not the same thing.

Foreign currency

Most readers of this site invoice in euros or dollars and declare in lari. The conversion is therefore part of every declaration you will ever file, and the National Bank of Georgia publishes the official rates that Georgian tax reporting runs on.

Which date’s rate applies to a given payment — the invoice date, the date the money arrived, or something else — is a detail worth establishing once, correctly, with an accountant, and then applying identically every month. It is a small question that becomes a large one only if you answer it differently in different months, which is what happens when nobody has decided.

The month it goes wrong

Something will eventually intervene: a hospital week, a move, a country with no internet where you were meant to have three days of internet. Here is the honest account of what follows, without the number the agency pages put in the headline.

There is a penalty for filing late, and interest accrues on tax paid late. Both sit in the Tax Code, which is published on matsne.gov.ge, and the amount actually accrued against you appears on your own account on rs.ge. I am not quoting a figure for either, because the figures I can find in English come from accounting firms rather than from the Revenue Service or the Code itself, and this is a site that would rather tell you where to look than give you a number that might be a year out of date. Check your rs.ge account first — it is authoritative about your case in a way no page can be.

It is arithmetic, not a summons. For a small monthly turnover figure a late declaration is a small amount of money and an unpleasant afternoon, not a status problem. The people for whom it becomes a status problem are the ones who let it run: several missed months against a live registration is a different conversation, and it is one worth pre-empting with an accountant rather than with hope.

File the late one, then pay. The order matters — the liability is calculated from the declaration, so there is nothing to settle until it exists. Doing them in the other order is a common instinct and produces a payment sitting against no obligation.

Whether to file on RS.ge yourself

Do it yourself. This is the clearest case on the site.

The monthly declaration for a single-activity Individual Entrepreneur with small business status is a short form with one meaningful number in it. Once you have the routine — a standing calendar entry for the 10th, not the 15th, so the deadline is a backstop rather than the plan — it is a quarter of an hour.

What an accountant is genuinely worth here is not the filing. It is the three questions underneath it: which figure goes in the box, which date’s exchange rate you use, and whether your income belongs to the registered activity in the first place. Buy an hour of that in month one, then file the rest yourself. What an accountant costs in Tbilisi is tomorrow’s post, and the published monthly rate cards are a useful reality check against what you are being quoted.

The exception is the reader with employees, VAT registration, or several distinct activities. Once there is payroll or VAT in the picture this stops being a fifteen-minute job, and PwC gives mandatory VAT registration once taxable turnover exceeds 100,000 GEL in any continuous 12-month period, at 18% — a threshold a fifth of the small business ceiling and measured over a rolling year rather than a calendar one.

The routine that makes it a non-event

Put the reminder on the 10th. Five days of slack costs nothing and absorbs every ordinary disruption. The 15th as the plan means the 15th as the failure point.

Keep a one-line record per invoice as you send it — date, client, currency, amount. Not a bookkeeping system; a text file. The declaration is then a sum rather than an investigation, and the investigation is what makes people put it off.

Check the account balance on rs.ge after you pay, not just after you file. Filing and paying are separate actions and the second one is the one that stops interest.

Do not let the first month be the one you improvise. The first declaration sets the pattern for every one after it — the figure you use, the rate you convert at, the day you do it. Get the pattern right once and the next thirty-five are the same fifteen minutes.

The wider decision this sits inside — the registration, the status, and since March 2026 the work authorisation — is priced end to end here.