Annual financial statement deposit
Important: Accounting documents and company reports for financial years beginning after 31 December 2021 must be submitted to the Company register since the DiRUG (Act on the Implementation of the Digitalisation Directive) came into force. Accounting documents and company reports with a financial year beginning before 01.01.2022 must continue to be submitted to the Federal Gazette.
Support in the question of which disclosure medium you need to submit your documents to is provided by the balance sheet navigator, which you can access via the start page of the publication platform.
Micro-entities (micro-corporations and micro-cooperatives) can fulfil their disclosure obligation by permanently filing their annual financial statement documents.
The following applies:
Corporations and cooperatives are considered micro-companies if they do not exceed 2 of the 3 relevant thresholds on 2 consecutive reporting dates:
- 350,000 euros balance sheet total (from the beginning of the financial year 01.01.2023: 450,000 euros balance sheet total)
- 700,000 euros revenue (from the beginning of the financial year 01.01.2023: 900,000 euros revenue)
- an average count of up to 10 employees
Micro-entities only need to prepare a simplified balance sheet and do not need to add an appendix to their annual financial statements if certain information is shown below the balance sheet.
Pursuant to § 264 (1) HGB, the information under the balance sheet of a micro-corporation include the following:
- Contingency information
- Advances and loans granted, indicating interest rates, to and with members of the management, supervisory board/advisory board, etc.
- In the case of Public limited company or Partnership limited by shares: Holdings and transactions in own shares
In the case of micro-cooperatives, the disclosures under the balance sheet pursuant to § 338 para. 4 HGB include:
- Number of members, amount of liability and business assets
- Name and address of the auditing association
- Claims of the cooperative against members of the Board of Directors/Supervisory Board
- Contingent liabilities
Regardless of their size, the following company types may not use the deposit option and have to publish their annual financial statements:
- Issuers of investments (according to VermAnlG)
- Energy companies (according to EnWG)
- Institutions according to KMAG
- Investment companies (according to KAGB)
- Credit and financial services institutions (also: securities, payment and e-money institutions)
- Reinsurance companies
- Companies whose sole purpose is to acquire, manage and realise participations in other companies without directly or indirectly intervening in their management (investment companies)
- Private equity companies (according to UBGG)
- Insurance companies and pension funds
- Authorised external capital management companies (in accordance with KAGB)
- Closed-end domestic public AIFs that are obliged to prepare accounts in accordance with the KAGB
- Capital market orientated corporations
- Groups (group accounting cannot be deposited)
In the case of German branches of a foreign head office (in accordance with Section 325a HGB), the legal provisions of the other country applicable to the head office, including the threshold values there, must be applied.
The deposit order must be made via the publication platform (www.publikations-plattform.de) or via software interface (web service).
Deposited annual financial statements are available in the Company Register for information retrieval. For the transmission as well as the retrieval you have to be registered on the platforms and logged in. In order to be able to submit data to the Company register, the submitter must also be identified once.