Wise, Stripe & PayPal Accounting & VAT in Bulgaria: 2026 Guide

If your Bulgarian EOOD receives income through Wise, Stripe or PayPal, almost everything you have read on Reddit is wrong. The platform balance is not "outside" your accounting until you withdraw it. The platform fee is not VAT-free just because Stripe did not charge you VAT on the invoice. The income is not taxed when you sweep the money to your Bulgarian bank — it is taxed when the sale happens. And since 1 January 2024, the platforms themselves report your cross-border payment data to the National Revenue Agency every quarter under the CESOP framework. The mismatch between what online forums say and what the Bulgarian system actually does is exactly where digital businesses get into trouble.

This guide is the practitioner's version. We cover the accounting treatment of Wise, Stripe and PayPal balances and fees; the Bulgarian VAT treatment of the fees themselves and of the sales running through these platforms; the CESOP reporting that your bank-account dashboard does not show you; and the way we structure the chart of accounts so a Bulgarian EOOD's books reconcile to its platform exports on demand. None of this is exotic. All of it is the everyday work of running a Bulgarian digital business correctly.

What Wise, Stripe and PayPal Actually Are

The category labels matter, because Bulgarian accounting and VAT rules treat banks, payment institutions and payment processors slightly differently.

• Wise (formerly TransferWise) — an authorised payment institution providing multi-currency accounts and currency conversion. Not a bank. EU customers contract with Wise Europe SA (Belgium) or Wise Payments Limited (depending on the user category). Balances are pooled with safeguarding accounts, not deposits.
• Stripe — a payment processor for online businesses. EU customers contract with Stripe Payments Europe Limited (Ireland). Funds collected from your customers sit in Stripe's holding accounts and are paid out to your designated bank on a payout schedule. Stripe fees are charged per transaction; some additional services (Tax, Atlas, Billing) have separate fee streams.
• PayPal — a payment service provider regulated as a credit institution in Luxembourg. EU customers contract with PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. Balances can be held in the PayPal wallet or transferred out to a linked bank account.

For Bulgarian accounting purposes, all three are payment accounts belonging to the company. Whether they sit on the BNB's bank list or not is a regulatory question; whether they are part of your accounting is not. They are. Every balance, every transaction in and out, every fee, and every currency conversion goes through the books.

Bulgarian EOOD running through Stripe or Wise? We will tell you in 15 minutes — free. If you also need to open a Bulgarian bank account behind the platforms, see our piece on why Bulgarian banks reject foreigners.

Accounting Treatment Inside the Bulgarian EOOD

The structural principle is simple: Wise, Stripe and PayPal are recorded as separate ledger accounts inside the Bulgarian accounting system, distinct from the Bulgarian bank account and from each other. Where the platform supports multiple currencies, each currency is a sub-account.

What gets recorded

• Opening balance at the start of the period;
• Every incoming payment — receipts from customers, refunds in, transfers in from other platforms or the Bulgarian bank;
• Every outgoing payment — payouts to the Bulgarian bank, supplier payments, transfers out, currency conversions;
• Every fee — Stripe per-transaction fees, PayPal commercial fees, Wise conversion fees, monthly platform charges;
• Currency revaluation at month-end and year-end for each non-functional-currency balance;
• Closing balance at the end of the period — this is the receivable from the platform reported on the balance sheet.

Sources of record

Bulgarian accounting requires source documentation. For each platform that means:

• Stripe — monthly invoice for fees (downloadable from the Stripe dashboard) and the transaction-level export reconciled to the deposit-level export;
• PayPal — monthly statement plus the transaction history;
• Wise — monthly statement per currency, plus the transaction history with fee breakdown.

We connect these to the Bulgarian accounting system either through API integration or through monthly CSV reconciliation, depending on the volume. Either way, the platform is part of the books, not parallel to them.

VAT on Platform Fees — Reverse Charge

This is the question most often asked badly. The clean answer requires distinguishing two layers.

The cross-border B2B rule

Wise (Belgium / UK depending on the entity), Stripe (Ireland) and PayPal (Luxembourg) charge fees to a Bulgarian VAT-registered business. Under the Bulgarian VAT Act, cross-border B2B services to a Bulgarian taxable person are subject to the reverse charge mechanism. The supplier does not charge VAT on the invoice; the Bulgarian recipient self-assesses Bulgarian VAT in its own VAT return and, where the input VAT is fully deductible, takes the corresponding deduction in the same return. Net VAT impact is normally zero; the bookkeeping impact is mandatory.

Exempt or taxable underlying service?

Where the underlying supply is a VAT-exempt financial service — the classic position for PayPal as a payment service provider — the reverse charge is still reported but at zero rate, because the supply itself is exempt. Where the underlying supply is a taxable service — more often the analysis applied to Stripe's payment-processing service — reverse charge produces VAT to be self-assessed and (for a VAT-registered Bulgarian business with full input deduction) deducted in the same period. Wise's payment-institution services are generally treated as exempt financial services along the PayPal model.

The classification of a specific platform's fee depends on the supplier's own invoicing position and the precise nature of the service supplied. Bulgarian accountants typically apply reverse charge consistently and reconcile against the platforms' invoices, with input VAT deducted where the underlying supply is taxable. This is fact-specific. We model it for each client.

Whichever classification applies, the cross-border B2B service must enter your Bulgarian VAT return — the only question is which boxes.

VAT on Sales Made Through the Platforms

The fees are one VAT question; the sales running through the platforms are another. The treatment depends on who the customer is and where they sit.

The single most important practical point: once your annual B2C EU-wide sales cross EUR 10,000, you register the Bulgarian EOOD for the One Stop Shop (OSS) through the National Revenue Agency, charge the destination-country VAT rate (Germany 19%, France 20%, Ireland 23%, etc.) on each B2C sale, and remit all collected VAT to the NRA via a single quarterly OSS return. The NRA forwards the remittance to the relevant EU authorities. Without OSS, you would have to register for VAT individually in every EU country where you have a B2C customer — operationally untenable for a small digital business.

SaaS businesses, course creators, e-commerce sellers and most platform-based digital businesses cross the OSS threshold quickly. For background on how OSS interacts with the Bulgarian VAT system, the European Commission's Bulgaria-OSS overview is a useful reference.

CESOP — What the NRA Already Knows

This is the change most clients have not heard about. Under Council Directive (EU) 2020/284, EU payment service providers — Stripe, PayPal, Wise, the major banks, every payment institution — must report data on cross-border payments to tax authorities. In Bulgaria the rules entered into force on 1 January 2024, and the data is transmitted to the National Revenue Agency through its electronic portal.

What the platforms report, per quarter:

• The payee's identity and Bulgarian tax identifier where known;
• The number, amount and dates of cross-border payments received by each payee;
• The originating country and the platform's own reference data.

The reporting threshold is more than 25 cross-border payments to a single payee in a calendar quarter. Most digital businesses with EU and international customers cross this trigger easily. The data lands in the EU-wide CESOP database and is shared with the relevant national tax authorities. In practice, the NRA can cross-check your Bulgarian VAT return and corporate-tax declaration against the volume of payments the platforms tell them you received — independently of what you reported.

Foreign Currency and the 2026 Euro Adoption

Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026 at the fixed conversion rate of 1 EUR = 1.95583 BGN. For Bulgarian accounting the functional currency from that date is the euro, so EUR balances on Wise, Stripe or PayPal no longer create FX results. Balances and transactions in other currencies — USD, GBP, CAD, AUD, CHF — still do.

The standard mechanic:

• At transaction date, each non-EUR amount is translated into euro using an acceptable rate (Bulgarian National Bank reference rate is the standard, applied consistently);
• At period end (monthly or annually), non-EUR balances are revalued at the closing rate, with the difference recognised in the profit and loss account;
• At realisation (conversion or transfer out), the realised FX gain or loss closes the period's translation difference.

Wise multi-currency accounts make this transparent because each currency has its own balance and statement. Stripe's multi-currency presents a more complex picture because settlement currency, processing currency and payout currency can differ — and the per-transaction FX margin Stripe applies is itself a fee that needs to be recorded. We tag each platform sub-account by currency at setup and the FX reconciliation runs automatically.

Multi-currency Stripe or Wise balances confusing your accounts? We build the chart of accounts to surface the FX cleanly.

How We Set Up a Bulgarian Digital Business

Three blocks of work that, in our practice, separate a clean setup from the kind of files that end in an NRA letter.

1. Chart of accounts and platform connections. We open separate ledger accounts for each platform, with sub-accounts per currency where the platform is multi-currency. Each platform's transaction export or API feed connects to the accounting system for monthly reconciliation. Platform fees go to a dedicated expense account so they are visible in the P&L, not buried in "other expenses".
2. VAT registration and OSS. We register the EOOD for Bulgarian VAT — at the EUR 51,130 threshold, or voluntarily where the platform model makes it worthwhile from day one. Where B2C cross-border EU sales are expected to cross EUR 10,000/year, we register for OSS through the NRA in parallel. Reverse charge on platform fees is set up as a recurring entry in the VAT return template.
3. CESOP reconciliation. We build a quarterly reconciliation between the platforms' transaction exports and the company's VAT and corporate-tax filings, so the file already matches what the NRA receives from CESOP. When the NRA asks — and they increasingly do — the answer is ready.

Common Pitfalls We Fix

1. Treating Stripe balance as "outside" the books until withdrawal

Revenue is accrued when the sale happens. End-of-year Stripe balances are part of that year's revenue, even if the cash sits in Stripe until February.

2. Missing reverse charge on platform fees

The most common VAT-return gap we find when rebuilding files. Stripe, PayPal and Wise charge cross-border B2B fees that must be reported in the Bulgarian VAT return whether or not VAT was on the invoice.

3. Selling B2C across the EU without OSS once above EUR 10,000

The EUR 10,000 threshold is EU-wide for B2C cross-border supplies. Once crossed, OSS becomes mandatory; without it, you are technically required to register for VAT in every destination country.

4. Booking Stripe fees in "other expenses"

Burying platform fees in a generic line prevents reconciliation and obscures the real cost of payments. Bulgarian accountants who do this rarely catch reverse-charge or input-VAT issues.

5. Ignoring CESOP because "no one has asked"

The NRA does not need to ask before they check. The CESOP data feed lands quarterly. Reconciliation is the default state of audit now, not the response to one.

Questions about your specific EOOD Stripe accounting setup? Ask us — we rebuild digital-business files from generalist-accountant chaos every week.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclaimer: This article provides general information about Bulgarian accounting and VAT treatment of payment platforms. It does not constitute individual legal, tax or accounting advice. VAT classification of platform fees and OSS registration questions are fact-specific. Last reviewed: May 21, 2026.