If you have just set up a company in Vietnam — a representative office turning into a subsidiary, a foreign-owned LLC, a joint venture — the bookkeeping obligation lands faster than most founders expect. It is not a year-end task. It is a monthly rhythm, and the first deadline arrives before the first customer does.
This article is the plain-English version of what Vietnamese law requires. It is written for the person who signs off, not for the accountant doing the entries.
The five things the law actually requires
Strip away the detail and a foreign-owned company in Vietnam owes five things:
- A statutory ledger in Vietnamese, denominated in VND.
- A person formally responsible for accounting — in most cases a chief accountant.
- Compliant e-invoices, issued through an approved provider and registered with the tax authority.
- Periodic tax filings — VAT monthly or quarterly, personal income tax withholding, and the annual corporate income tax finalisation.
- An annual financial statement, audited by an independent audit firm.
Each of those is where a foreign-owned company usually gets caught out, so take them one at a time.
1. The books must be in Vietnamese, in dong
This is the requirement that surprises people most, and it is not negotiable by preference.
The Accounting Law 88/2015/QH13 provides that the written language used in accounting is Vietnamese. Where a foreign language has to be used on vouchers, accounting books and financial statements used in Vietnam, both Vietnamese and the foreign language must appear — not one instead of the other. It also provides that the accounting currency is the Vietnamese dong.
There is a carve-out worth knowing: a company whose receipts and payments are predominantly in a single foreign currency may select that currency as its accounting currency. But the statutory financial statements filed in Vietnam still have to be converted to VND. So the carve-out saves you translation of transactions, not of reporting.
The practical consequence: an English-only ledger in a foreign accounting system is a management record. It is not the statutory one. Every company that tries to run only the foreign system ends up rebuilding a Vietnamese set at year end, under time pressure, from memory — which is exactly when errors get expensive.
2. Someone must be formally responsible
Vietnamese law treats accounting as a named responsibility, not a diffuse one. An accounting unit must have a chief accountant (kế toán trưởng). Micro-enterprises may appoint a person in charge of accounting instead, and a newly established company is normally allowed a limited window to fill the role rather than being expected to have one on day one.
Two things follow that matter commercially:
- The chief accountant does not have to be your employee. Engaging an accounting service firm is a normal and accepted arrangement, and for a company with a handful of transactions a month it is usually the cheaper one.
- Whoever holds the role carries real obligations. This is not a title you hand to the office manager as an extra duty.
3. E-invoices are issued through the system, not printed by you
Vietnam runs a centralised electronic invoice regime. From 1 July 2026, it operates under Decree 254/2026/ND-CP and Circular 91/2026/TT-BTC, which replaced Decree 123/2020 and Decree 70/2025.
Two consequences for a foreign-owned company:
- Output invoices. You issue them through a provider that has a contract with the tax authority to receive, transmit and store e-invoice data. Your foreign accounting system almost certainly is not on that list, so this is a separate piece of software — or a Vietnamese system that includes it.
- Input invoices. Your suppliers' invoices are filed with the tax authority, and you retrieve them from the national portal at
hoadondientu.gdt.gov.vn. This is where a great deal of manual labour hides: someone logs in, filters by period, downloads XML files, and keys them into the ledger. It is the single most automatable task in Vietnamese bookkeeping, and the one most companies are still doing by hand.
4. The filing calendar
The rhythm, for a company on a calendar fiscal year:
| Obligation | When |
|---|---|
| VAT return — monthly filers | By the 20th of the following month |
| VAT return — quarterly filers | By the last day of the first month of the next quarter |
| Personal income tax withholding | Monthly or quarterly, matching your VAT cycle |
| Corporate income tax finalisation + financial statements | Within 3 months of year end — 31 March |
Which VAT cycle you fall into depends on your revenue and how long you have been operating; your accountant will confirm it, and it does not change often once set.
Corporate income tax itself is 20% as the standard rate under the Corporate Income Tax Law 67/2025/QH15, with 15% for companies whose annual revenue does not exceed 3 billion VND and 17% for those above 3 billion up to 50 billion — subject to exclusions for companies in related-party groups, which is precisely the situation most foreign-owned subsidiaries are in. Do not assume the reduced rate applies to you because revenue is small.
5. The annual audit
Foreign-invested enterprises are among the entities required to have annual financial statements audited by an independent audit firm, under the Law on Independent Audit 67/2011/QH12 and Decree 17/2012/ND-CP. This is not optional above a size threshold; it attaches to the foreign-invested status itself.
The audit is also the moment your bookkeeping quality becomes visible. Auditors work from the Vietnamese ledger, the vouchers behind it, and the invoice data the tax authority already holds. If your ledger was reconstructed in March from bank statements and a spreadsheet, the audit is where that shows up — as scope issues, extra fees, and sometimes a qualified opinion your parent company then has to explain.
Which accounting regime applies
Statutory reporting in Vietnam follows Vietnamese Accounting Standards, not IFRS. Vietnam has published a roadmap toward IFRS adoption, but for now your statutory statements are prepared under a Vietnamese regime:
- Circular 99/2025/TT-BTC, which from 1 January 2026 replaced Circular 200/2014 as the general enterprise accounting regime.
- Circular 133/2016/TT-BTC, which remains available for small and medium-sized enterprises.
If your parent reports under IFRS or US GAAP, you will be running a conversion at group level regardless. That is normal and expected — what is not viable is treating the group's IFRS numbers as the Vietnamese filing.
What this means in practice
For a foreign-owned company of ordinary size, the honest summary is:
- The statutory work is not optional and not year-end. It runs monthly.
- Your group accounting system will not satisfy it. Keep it for group reporting; you still need a Vietnamese statutory system.
- Most of the monthly effort is data entry, not judgement — pulling invoices off the tax portal, matching bank lines to entries, keying in what a machine could read.
That last point is where the cost actually sits. A company with two hundred purchase invoices a month is not paying an accountant for two hundred acts of professional judgement. It is paying for two hundred acts of typing.
Where Vietbooks fits
Vietbooks is a Vietnamese accounting system built around exactly that gap. Three things it does that a foreign system cannot:
- It fetches your input invoices from the tax authority automatically. Rather than someone logging into the portal each period, Vietbooks pulls invoices nightly and backfills the year, so your ledger and the tax authority's records stay aligned without anyone downloading a file.
- It reads bank statements into journal entries. Upload the statement; the AI proposes the entries, and your accountant reviews rather than types.
- It keeps the statutory set in Vietnamese and VND under Circular 99/2025 or Circular 133, and issues e-invoices through approved providers — so the books your auditor and the tax authority read are the books your team is already working in.
Free for 30 days, no card required. Start a trial.
Read next
- Can you run QuickBooks or Xero in Vietnam?
- Vietnam's e-invoice system, explained
- Outsourced accounting in Vietnam vs hiring in-house
This article is general guidance, not legal or tax advice, and reflects the position as at August 2026. It refers to the Accounting Law 88/2015/QH13, the Corporate Income Tax Law 67/2025/QH15, the Law on Independent Audit 67/2011/QH12 and Decree 17/2012/ND-CP, Decree 254/2026/ND-CP and Circular 91/2026/TT-BTC on electronic invoices, and Circulars 99/2025/TT-BTC and 133/2016/TT-BTC on accounting regimes. Rules change and thresholds are subject to conditions; confirm your own position with a licensed adviser or the tax authority that administers your company before acting.