Monthly bookkeeping and tax filing for companies in Thailand

01Which companies should hand this work over

The companies that hand it over usually fall into one of four situations.

• Newly registered in Thailand, with no filing rhythm yet. The first year is where companies most often come unstuck on a form they did not know existed.
• A local accountant who keeps the books, with no one who owns the tax position. Books that balance are not the same thing as filings that are right. Those are two different jobs.
• A suspicion that filings were missed in the past, and a wish to know where things actually stand. Which periods to go back and file, in what order, and how the surcharge is worked out should be planned as a whole before anything is submitted.
• Any company making payments abroad. See the section below on the three filings Chinese-invested companies miss most — payments abroad are the most frequent source of missed filings.

02What we actually do

The work splits into five pieces.

• Monthly bookkeeping. Books kept under Thai accounting standards, vouchers collected and classified, a trial balance each month.
• Monthly tax filings. Payroll withholding on employees; withholding on service fees and rent paid to individuals and to Thai juristic persons; VAT; social security contributions; and the two forms that a payment abroad triggers — all checked against the current official position before they are filed.
• Half-year and annual work. The half-year corporate income tax prepayment, the annual return and liaison with the auditor, the shareholders' meeting and the submission of annual financial statements — laid out as one chain, with the auditor's slot reserved well ahead.
• A monthly compliance review report. Each month you get a report in Chinese and English: what was filed, any question of tax position worth flagging, and what falls due next month. Not a stack of screenshots — conclusions you can read.
• A review of historical gaps, and the remedy. Before we take over we do a stock-take and list what is already wrong, so the order of remediation is a decision made up front rather than a series of discoveries afterwards.

03The three filings Chinese-invested companies miss most

These three come up most often.

• A payment abroad triggers two obligations, not one. On service fees, royalties and software subscriptions paid offshore, withholding tax and reverse-charge VAT are two separate returns with two separate sets of logic. File one and the other is simply not filed.
• Paying on the owner's personal card does not exempt the company. An overseas software subscription put on a personal card is still the company's — the company is the actual user and remains the party obliged to file.
• "No transactions this month" is not the same as "nothing to file". A required return still has to be filed as a nil return; not filing it counts as late filing.

There is a problem harder to spot than an outright omission: a mismatch of tax months. If the month in which you report output VAT does not match the month in which your customer reports the input, the cross-check shows a mismatch, and that draws scrutiny. Invoicing, payment and filing have to line up.

04If you already have an accountant

That is common, and it is not a conflict. Two shapes come up most often. Full takeover — bookkeeping and filing both. Or a review layer — your local accountant carries on with the books, and we run an independent review against Revenue Department positions, producing a graded list of issues and what to do about each, with attention on reconciliation, cross-border obligations and the positions taken in the annual return.

Which one fits depends on where your existing team's capability ends and how much control you want to keep. That is worth settling in conversation before anything is decided.

05Why work with us

Five things we hold to.

• Checked against the current official wording, not against custom. Every judgment traces back to the statute or the announcement it came from, with the date it was retrieved.
• No rate and no amount that has not been verified. Where we cannot verify it, we write that the official source governs. In tax work that is a hard rule, not a slogan.
• Communication in Chinese, deliverables in Chinese and English. The report written for you and the English version that goes to the auditor and the authorities are both prepared here, so nothing has to be translated in between.
• Our advisers handle the filing end to end. You do not log into any filing system. Where the company seal is needed, or where a step has to be carried out by you in person, we schedule it in advance.
• Your accounting data stays in our own systems and is not passed to any third party.

More on who we are and how we work: about CTAC Thailand.

06What you receive

The deliverables:

• Monthly bookkeeping and a trial balance.
• The filed returns for every tax of the month, with the tax payment receipts collected together.
• A Monthly Tax Compliance Report in Chinese and English: what was filed this month, points of tax position to note, and next month's deadlines.
• Annually: audit liaison, the annual return filing, and submission of the annual financial statements.