Thailand filing deadline calendar for the full year (editable)

01Why it belongs on a sheet, not in your head

The most expensive misreading among owners of Chinese-invested companies is that Thai filing happens once a year. A Thai company that is trading normally has two waves of filings every month, on top of the half-year prepayment and the annual return. Miss one box and the fines and late charges start rolling month by month; and because the cycle repeats, one missed month usually turns into fighting on two fronts every month after that, catching up the old period while filing the new one.

What makes it harder: no two companies have the same calendar. Whether you have employees, whether you are already VAT-registered, whether you make cross-border payments, and when your accounting year ends decide how many lines your sheet actually has. Copying a generic list usually means filing something you did not owe and missing something you did. That is why this one is editable. Delete the rows that do not apply to your registration status, and what is left is your calendar.

02What the three sheets cover

Three sheets:

• Monthly cycle sheet: one batch in the first part of each month (withholding on employee salaries, withholding on service fees and commissions paid to individuals, withholding on rent and service fees paid to Thai companies, and the two returns for cross-border payments), then a second batch mid-month (the VAT return and social security contributions). Every row is marked with the period covered, the deadline, whether the return is mandatory, and whether a nil return is required.
• Annual milestone sheet: the half-year corporate income tax prepayment, the annual return and audit report, the shareholders' meeting and the filing of financial statements with the Department of Business Development. These are one chain: a single set of audit working papers feeds two departments, and the auditor's schedule has to be booked well ahead.
• Missed-item self-check sheet: the two separate obligations on cross-border payments, the mismatch created by attributing salary to the month it is paid, and nil returns on mandatory forms, each with a way to judge it.

03Three boxes that get missed most often

• A cross-border payment triggers two obligations, not one. When you pay service fees, royalties or software subscriptions overseas, withholding tax and reverse-charge VAT are two separate returns with two separate tests. File one and the other is a straight non-filing.
• Paying on the owner's personal card does not exempt you. An overseas software subscription paid on a personal card for the company still leaves the company, as the actual user, holding the filing obligation. In practice this is the single most common source of missed filings.
• "No transactions this month" is not the same as "nothing to file." A mandatory return still has to go in as a nil return, and not filing it counts as late all the same.

The dates in the sheet are the general deadlines for paper filing. Electronic filing normally carries an extension of a few days, and public holidays push deadlines back. How many days, and to what it applies, is set by the Revenue Department's announcements in force at the time, so do not write it into your internal procedures as a fixed benefit.

04How to use it

Three steps. First, delete the rows that do not apply to your company's actual registration status; what remains is your own calendar. Second, pull every deadline forward by seven to ten days and set that as the internal date for handing over the numbers, so that collecting the data and filing become two separate actions. Third, at the start of each month look back at the one before: was everything that was due actually filed, and has a new cross-border payment appeared that needs a line of its own?

If you suspect there are missed filings in the past, plan the whole thing before you start: which periods to catch up, in what order, and how the late charges are worked out. Catching up one period while missing the next leaves gaps and drags the problem out. Historical gaps like these have to be checked item by item against your registration status, your books and your contracts, so it is better to have our consulting team do a full stocktake first.