Is Your Business Ready for Bulgaria's SAF-T Mandate?
Bulgaria's parliament folded a phased SAF-T requirement into law in 2025, and it started taking effect on 1 January 2026 — first for large enterprises, expanding to every VAT-registered business by 2030. If your accounting still lives across spreadsheets, a handful of disconnected tools, or a system nobody's checked against this, now's the time to look at it, not 2029.
What SAF-T actually asks for
SAF-T (Standard Audit File for Tax) isn't a new form to fill in — it's a standardized structured data file the National Revenue Agency (NRA) can pull straight from your accounting records. The NRA published the final technical schema in July 2025, and submissions are electronic, signed with a qualified electronic signature. Accounting entries and payment data go in monthly, by the 14th of the following month; inventory and fixed-asset movements go in annually.
The practical implication is simple but easy to underestimate: your books need to already be in a shape a machine can read and validate, not just a shape a bookkeeper can explain. A tidy spreadsheet that makes sense to a human doesn't necessarily export into anything close to SAF-T's structure.
The timeline is phased — but the direction isn't in question
Large enterprises are in scope first, with the requirement widening every year until it reaches essentially every VAT-registered business — micro-enterprises are the only group carved out long-term — by 2030. If you're not a large enterprise today, it's tempting to treat this as someone else's problem. Two things argue against waiting: the scope only ever grows, never shrinks, and larger counterparties you invoice or buy from are going through exactly this shift right now, which tends to show up as new expectations about how you send and receive documents long before it's legally required of you.
What to actually check
Three questions are worth answering now, regardless of your current enterprise size: Can your accounting system export a complete, structured record of every transaction — not just a summary — on demand? Is that record already reconciled with what you'd actually submit, or does someone manually patch it together each month? And if you're running more than one system (a POS, a separate invoicing tool, an ERP that doesn't quite talk to either), who's responsible for making sure they agree with each other?
This is exactly the kind of problem that disappears when billing exposes an API your engineers can wire straight into accounting, rather than bolting the two together after the fact — one of the reasons it's a standard feature across the custom apps we build. We design software around how your country actually does business, which increasingly means designing for how your country's tax authority expects to see your data, not just how your team is used to keeping it.
Want a second pair of eyes on whether your current setup would survive a SAF-T audit cleanly? Let's talk.