Company Accounting in Morocco

Bookkeeping is the foundation: recording purchases, sales, bank and cash movements, matching entries, supporting every balance. Done regularly, this is the work that makes all the filings downstream of it possible, and that lets you answer a management question without spending three days rebuilding a financial year.

Then come the filing obligations: TVA returns under whichever regime your company falls into, instalments and the year-end settlement of corporate income tax (IS), the liasse fiscale (annual tax return package) drawn up after the year end, social security returns to the CNSS, and payslips with the corresponding withholdings.

The law requires every commercial company to keep proper accounts in line with the chart of accounts, and to retain its supporting documents for several years. Accounts that are missing, incomplete or unsupported are not a minor administrative lapse: they leave the company unable to prove its expenses, they expose it to a rejection of the accounts in a tax audit, and in practice they close off bank credit and public procurement.

The most common consequences remain mundane, however: penalties on returns filed late, a TVA credit never recovered for want of supporting documents, or a financial year that has to be rebuilt in a hurry because nobody was following it.

The three terms circulate as if they were synonyms, and that is a source of misunderstandings. In Moroccan usage, a fiduciaire or an accounting firm means a practice that keeps its clients' books, prepares their returns and guides them through their routine formalities. That is what the vast majority of small and mid-sized companies need.

The title of expert-comptable, by contrast, is protected: it presupposes registration on the roll of the Ordre des experts-comptables (the professional body), a qualification and a code of professional conduct. Certain engagements are reserved to its members, in particular statutory audit and the commissariat aux comptes (statutory auditor's mandate), along with the certifications that engage their responsibility for the accounts being regular and faithful.

In practical terms, if your company must appoint a statutory auditor, if an investor or a bank requires certified accounts, or if you are preparing a sale, you need a professional registered with the Ordre. For day-to-day bookkeeping, returns and payroll, a properly structured firm is enough. Before you sign, ask who will sign your statements, under what title, and who will be your contact day to day: a serious firm answers plainly and refers you to a registered colleague when the engagement calls for it.

The way it works is deliberately simple. You send us the month's documents, either uploaded to our shared workspace or handed over in person. We post them, we flag what is missing rather than letting a suspense account grow, then we prepare and file the returns due for the period.

Every month you receive a short update: turnover, provisional result, TVA payable or carried forward, deadlines ahead. That is what allows you to decide on a hire or an investment with your eyes open, and to avoid the unpleasant discovery at the year end.

In a tax audit, we take the file in hand. It begins with a close reading of the notice received and of the years covered, then with the preparation of the documents requested and the reconstruction of supporting evidence. We answer on the technical points in place of the director, we prepare each meeting with you, and we explain what in the proposed adjustments is genuinely open to challenge.

Our clients in Casablanca range from the single-shareholder services company to the industrial SME with around fifty employees, and we handle files in the other cities where we are present, with the same contact from one end of the year to the other.