Do I need an accountant for my Cyprus limited company?

Cyprus law asks two things of your limited company. Keep proper accounting records, and have an independent statutory auditor check your annual financial statements. Hiring an accountant for the monthly work isn't on that list. Whether you should hire one anyway comes down to one question we ask every founder who raises it. How much of your accounting is routine, and how much is judgment?

What does Cyprus law actually require from my company?

Proper books and annual accounts checked by an independent auditor. That's the whole list. The books first. Under the Assessment and Collection of Taxes Law, you must keep records that support every figure you file, and bring them up to date by the end of the fourth month after the month of each transaction. You must keep them for at least six years from the later of the filing deadline and the day you actually filed.

Then the accounts. Under the Companies Law, every Cyprus company prepares annual financial statements under IFRS, the international accounting standards, and a statutory auditor audits them. The one relief is at the small end. From 6 February 2026, a private company with net turnover up to €300,000 and total assets up to €500,000, both held for two financial years in a row, can have its accounts reviewed instead of fully audited. A review is lighter and cheaper, and a licensed auditor still does it.

Neither law says who keeps the books month to month. That part is yours to arrange however you like, as long as it's done properly and on time.

What does an accountant actually do for a small company?

For a typical small company, the monthly work is a loop. Collect the invoices and receipts. Book each one to the right account with the right VAT treatment. Match the bank statement against the books. Chase whatever is missing. Then put together the VAT return, which is due with payment by the 10th day of the second month after the quarter ends.

There are real judgment calls inside that loop: an unusual transaction, a grey-area deduction, a question about how to pay yourself. They are also rare. For most of the companies we see, judgment takes a few hours a year and repetition fills the rest. What a firm mostly sells you is that repetition done reliably, plus the comfort of knowing someone did it.

How much can I do myself with software?

All of the loop, if the software is built for Cyprus books. Sumly reads the documents you drop in or forward to your company's private inbox address, books them in double entry, and keeps each entry linked to the file it came from. The bank feed is read-only open banking, so transactions arrive on their own and Sumly matches them against your invoices and recorded purchases. Reconciliation stops being a task on your list. And because every Cyprus VAT code in the books maps to a box of the official VAT return, the return is already put together when the quarter closes, waiting for your review.

Review is the word that matters. Sumly prepares the returns and a person submits them through Tax For All: you on Base, Sumly on Plus, your Sumly certified bookkeeper on Premium. Nothing reaches the Tax Department until a person approves it, so keeping your own books never means software filing things behind your back. The mechanical work happens automatically. The sign-off stays human.

When should I hire a person?

When the answer turns on your own circumstances and no article can settle it for you. In practice that means four situations:

• Group structures, cross-border arrangements, share reorganisations and investor rounds are advisory work. Pay a professional who can sit down with your specifics.
• A regulated sector with its own reporting rules needs specialist help from the start.
• You'd rather never touch the books, which is a fair choice. On Premium, a Sumly certified bookkeeper does the work inside your own dashboard, so you keep the live view instead of waiting for a quarterly PDF from a firm's back office.
• The last two years are in a drawer of receipts. Let a person lead the cleanup. We migrate your existing books for free when you switch to Sumly, and the software keeps things clean from then on.

How do I decide?

Count the hours. Take your last month of accounting and split it into mechanical work and judgment calls. If judgment takes a few hours a year, software plus an auditor at year-end covers you. If it fills every week, hire the professional and spend your own hours on the business.

Whichever way you lean, year-end looks the same. An independent auditor audits or reviews the accounts, and you can order that audit from a partner auditor inside Sumly. To compare the costs first, see Sumly vs an accounting firm. The plans are on the pricing page.

Questions founders actually ask