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How to choose an accountant in Cyprus

What Cyprus accountants charge for, which registrations can be checked before signing, and what a compliance quote should itemise.

7 min read

How to Choose an Accountant in Cyprus — illustrasjonsbilde

Photo: Mikhail Nilov on Pexels

ByChryso Ioannou· Editor, tax, audit and company law

Chryso covers accounting, audit, tax and company administration in Cyprus. She tracks filing deadlines and threshold changes as they are issued, since the ones that catch people out are almost always the ones that moved quietly.

Reviewed by Loucas Theodorou, Reviewer

Published

Three things about a Cyprus accountancy firm can be established before any money changes hands: that the company exists and is current at the Registrar of Companies, that the person who will actually sign the work is a member of ICPAC, and that whoever signs a statutory audit holds a licence to do so. Everything else — responsiveness, whether the firm understands a particular trade, whether it will still be answering emails in the last week of March — has to be inferred from how the firm behaves while it is quoting. The quoting stage is therefore the most informative part of the process, and it is worth slowing down.

What can actually be verified

The checkable set is small, and the difference between a firm that clears it and one that does not is larger than any difference in style or price.

  • Legal existence. The trading name on the proposal should resolve to a registered entity at the Registrar of Companies, with its own filings up to date. A firm that is late with its own annual return is describing its capacity accurately.
  • Individual membership. ICPAC keeps registers of members and of the practising certificates and licences it issues. The relevant question is not whether the firm mentions ICPAC on its website but which named individual is registered, and in what capacity.
  • Audit licence. Signing an audit report is a licensed activity in its own right. An accountant may hold membership without holding that licence, which is why the auditor's name on a set of financial statements is often not the name on the letterhead.
  • Administrative service provider licence. If the firm will also act as registered office, provide nominee directors or hold shares on a client's behalf, that is regulated work under a separate authorisation, supervised by ICPAC for its own members.
  • VAT registration. A firm advising on VAT should be able to state its own registration number without hesitation.

What cannot be verified from outside is the part most people want ranked: whether the work will be accurate and whether the phone will be answered in February. This directory records registrations, coverage and services as recorded, with the date each field was checked. It does not carry opinions about quality, because there is no defensible way to collect them.

Registrations that matter

The distinction that causes the most confusion in Cyprus is between three different roles that are often performed inside one office.

A bookkeeper records transactions and can prepare VAT returns. No licence is required to do this, and a competent bookkeeper working under supervision is entirely appropriate for a small trading company.

An accountant in the professional sense is a member of ICPAC holding a practising certificate, and is the person who takes responsibility for the financial statements, the corporate tax computation and the advice attached to them.

An auditor holds a statutory audit licence and signs the audit report. Under the Companies Law a Cyprus company is required to have its financial statements audited, with narrow exemptions defined by turnover and asset thresholds set out in the law. Whether a particular company falls inside those thresholds is a question to put to the firm in writing, not something to assume from turnover alone.

Many smaller practices do the bookkeeping and accounting in-house and place the audit with a licensed auditor elsewhere. That arrangement is normal and legal. What is not acceptable is discovering it after signing, because it affects timing, cost and who holds the working papers.

Questions to ask

  1. Who signs, by name

    Not the firm — the individual. The answer should be a person whose ICPAC registration can be looked up, and who will still be the signatory if the company grows.

  2. Is the audit done here or placed outside

    If it is placed outside, the second firm should be named at proposal stage, with its fee shown separately rather than folded into a single figure.

  3. Who does the day-to-day bookkeeping, and where

    Some practices keep it in the office; others use offshore processing teams. Neither is wrong, but it determines how quickly a query about a single invoice gets answered.

  4. What language the records are kept in

    Working papers and management accounts prepared only in Greek are a poor fit for a foreign-owned company whose directors need to read them, and retrofitting an English reporting pack later costs more than specifying it at the start.

  5. How many year-ends the signatory carries

    Cyprus compliance work is heavily seasonal. A firm that takes on more December year-ends than it can clear is not being dishonest in July; it is being optimistic.

  6. What the exit looks like

    Handover terms belong in the engagement letter: what is returned, in what format, and how quickly. This is much easier to agree before a relationship starts than during a disagreement.

What a good quote looks like

Fees for accountancy work in Cyprus are quoted against volume and against a fixed calendar of obligations, which is why an itemised proposal is more useful than a single annual figure.

A proposal worth comparing separates at least the following lines: monthly bookkeeping, banded by transaction volume rather than by turnover; payroll, per employee per month; the VAT return per period; preparation of the annual financial statements; the audit fee; the corporate tax return; the annual return filed at the Registrar of Companies; and an hourly rate for anything outside that list, stated in advance.

The calendar behind those lines is fixed and public, and it explains where the work concentrates. Standard VAT periods are quarterly, with the return and the payment due 40 days after the period closes. Company provisional tax is settled in two instalments, due on 31/07 and 31/12, based on an estimate of the year's taxable profit that the firm should be revisiting before the second instalment rather than repeating the first. VAT registration itself becomes compulsory once taxable turnover passes €15,600 in any 12-month period, and a firm that watches that line for a growing client is doing something a cheaper quote may not include.

Warning signs

A single undifferentiated annual fee covering "all accounting and tax" is the most common one. It is not evidence of dishonesty, but it removes any ability to compare proposals, and it tends to be re-quoted upwards once the volume of work becomes clear.

Also worth pausing on: an audit quoted by a practice with no licensed auditor and no named external one; a refusal to put handover terms in the engagement letter; advice that a transaction can be kept off the books; an engagement letter that never arrives; and a fee that is materially below every other proposal received, which usually means the scope is narrower rather than the firm more efficient.

Distance is a weaker signal than it looks. Cyprus is small, filings are electronic, and a Nicosia practice can serve a company operating in Paphos without difficulty. Physical proximity matters mainly when someone has to collect paper records regularly, which is worth deciding early — the district and town pages on this site exist so that a firm within collection distance can be found where that applies.

Common questions

Does every Cyprus company need an audit?

Audited financial statements are the default requirement under the Companies Law, with exemptions defined by thresholds in the legislation. Whether a particular company qualifies is a determination the accountant should make in writing, referencing the current thresholds, rather than a conclusion to reach from turnover alone.

What does ICPAC membership actually mean?

It means the individual has met the Institute's entry requirements and is subject to its rules, including continuing professional development, complaints handling and, where applicable, monitoring of practising firms. It is a floor, not a ranking. It also means there is somewhere to take a complaint that is not the firm itself.

Are there reviews or ratings of accountants in Cyprus?

Not from this site. Listings here record registrations, services and coverage as recorded, with dates — there are no reviews, ratings or testimonials, and the absence is deliberate. Professional service quality is difficult to evidence from a handful of anonymous submissions, and easy to manufacture. The accounting category page and the wider services index are organised around what a document can prove.

What is the difference between the accountant and the auditor?

The accountant prepares the financial statements and the tax computation. The auditor forms an independent opinion on those statements and signs a report saying so. Independence requirements mean the two roles cannot always sit with the same person, which is why a company frequently deals with two names.

Can an accountant in one district handle a company registered in another?

Yes. Registration of a company is national, filings go to the Registrar of Companies and the Tax Department electronically, and there is no district element to either. Location matters for meetings and for collecting physical records, and for nothing else in the compliance cycle.

When should a company change accountant?

Not in the weeks before a filing deadline, if it can be avoided. The practical window is early in a financial year, after the previous year's statements are signed, when the outgoing firm has nothing outstanding and the handover is a transfer of complete records rather than a half-finished file.

Accountancy firms in Cyprus

8 companies covering this area.

Sources

  1. Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Cyprus (ICPAC) — member and licence registers — retrieved 2026-07-24
  2. Tax Department — filing obligations and deadlines — retrieved 2026-07-24
  3. Department of Registrar of Companies and Intellectual Property — retrieved 2026-07-24

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