Read our insights, reports and more

Matters concerning evaluation of the creditworthiness of consumers have returned to the focus during the last year. Discussions revolve around consumers’ increased loan burden and share of loans in default; there is lobbying for additional support from the establishment of a positive credit registry, and the Financial Inspectorate has started getting tougher with fines on market participants who don’t abide by the rules.

Those operating in the financial sector are bound by various laws along with requirements for internal audit arising from those laws. In addition, the Auditors Activities Act governs the provision of internal audit service, defining who is allowed to be engaged in the professional activities of an internal auditor.

The rules on the contact person underwent a facelift as part of company law reform, the majority of the amendments of which came into force on 1 February 2023.

Last year, an amendment to the Commercial Register Act was passed, which meant more fines for companies for the purpose of making the Estonian business environment more transparent.

In their work, internal auditors often come across a situation where clients want to have an internal audit done in their organization, but since they have no previous contact with an internal audit service, they have a number of questions.

A high-quality accountant who uses modern technological solutions – up to and including AI – can do more for a company than ever before. An accountant can be closer to a CFO’s skillsets than a data entry role.

Where to start if your company doesn’t have a human resources director and HR policy, and on top of it, has a negative employer net promoter score? Grant Thornton Baltic’s HR director Marge Litvinova and recruiter Kätlin Treima share some valuable experience.

Business operators are hard-pressed to find an auditor to go over their annual report, since there are fewer and fewer auditors every year, but the amount of work just keeps on growing. The worsening quality of the work done by auditing companies is also a concern.

Transfer pricing is often talked about solely in a tax accounting context but actually determining transfer price requires the existence of a strategically good budgetary and cost accounting system in managerial reporting. If a company has designed a detailed, adequate cost accounting system, a key precondition for shaping transfer prices has been met, especially when it comes to transactions related to goods and services where a clear cost base is even more important than mark-up.

All of us have a work life and a private life, and no matter how we try, it is hard to keep them completely separate. Problems at work come home with us and vice versa. That is the underpinning for my belief that an employer who genuinely cares about its people will see investing into maintaining mental health as an investment in its employees.

Many foreign nationals doing business in Estonia recently received an unpleasant surprise: they are unable to submit their annual report for their company to the Business Register, since they failed to renew their digital ID by the deadline. Meanwhile, the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) has imposed additional conditions on applying for a new digital ID.

The most important aspect of extraordinary cancellation of an employment contract is that the notice has to be reproducible in writing. The employee should thus be precise in their wording, and the employer should be quick to respond.

More and more Estonian companies prefer to outsource payroll functions rather than have a staff position. The reason is that it’s a time-consuming job and requires use of the latest software and keeping up to date with frequent changes to legislation.

As in life itself, the unexpected often strikes in the business world. The article deals with one such scenario that many probably have never thought of.

The need to prepare financial forecasts can arise in various situations. In the artocle we will give examples of some of the most common situations where the company's management has to undertake the preparation of forecasts.

Estonia has about 150,000 businesses engaged in economic activity – that means each one of them ought to have accounting software or some other way of keeping accounts.