Nobody is late with ANAF because they do not care. They are late because one obligation lives in three places at once: the amount is in a declaration, the deadline is in a calendar somebody else keeps, and the payment itself is an errand in a different window entirely.
Three systems, one obligation, and the joints between them are where companies lose money — not in large amounts, but in interest and penalties that accrue quietly, are never budgeted, and turn up months later as a figure nobody can explain.
This is the whole path: what falls due when, how the money actually reaches the state, what a partial payment really pays, and what a day of delay costs.
The 25th is the hinge
Most of what a Romanian company owes each month is due on the 25th of the month following the period it relates to. Salary taxes and social contributions declared in D112, VAT declared in D300, and the quarterly profit-tax instalment all land on that date, which is why the 25th is the busiest day in a Romanian finance calendar.
It is not the only one. ANAF's calendar of fiscal obligations is published month by month and lists every filing and payment date, including the ones that fall on the 8th, the 15th or the last working day. Two consequences are worth stating plainly:
- The filing deadline and the payment deadline are usually the same date. Filing on time and paying late is a very common shape, and it is the expensive one — a declared but unpaid obligation is a debt with a start date on it.
- When the deadline falls on a weekend or a public holiday it moves to the next working day. That is the only extension there is.
Where to see what you actually owe
The authoritative view is not your own bookkeeping — it is what ANAF has recorded against your fiscal code. That lives in the Virtual Private Space (SPV), which has been the mandatory channel for companies and sole traders since March 2022: papers handed in at a counter are not considered filed at all.
Two things in there are worth knowing by name:
- The payer's ledger (fișa pe plătitor), available in full and in simplified form. It is ANAF's own statement of what you owe, obligation by obligation, accessories included. Ask for it before assuming a balance is zero.
- The payment menu (Plata obligațiilor fiscale), which lists outstanding obligations and hands them to ghiseul.ro for card payment.
A difference between your records and the payer's ledger is rarely a rounding problem. It is usually an old obligation absorbing new payments — which is the next section.
The ways money reaches ANAF
| Route | What it needs | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|
| SPV → Plata obligațiilor fiscale → ghiseul.ro | SPV access and a card | Small, one-off amounts. Card limits make it impractical for payroll-sized sums. |
| Bank transfer to the Treasury account | The correct Treasury IBAN and a correct payment reference | The normal route for a company, and the only one that scales to a whole month of obligations. |
| Cash at a Treasury counter | A trip | The exception, and increasingly rare. |
For a large group of obligations the destination is a single account at your Treasury unit — 55.03 for the state budget, social insurance and health fund obligations of legal entities, and 55.04 for income tax and contributions owed by individuals. ANAF distributes from there to the individual budgets.
Which obligations go to the single account and which have an account of their own is listed in ANAF's payment guide. Check it rather than copying last year's payment order: an amount paid into the wrong account is not a late payment, it is an unpaid obligation sitting next to a credit somewhere else.
A partial payment does not pay what you think
This is the rule that surprises people, and it is Article 165 of the Fiscal Procedure Code: when the amount paid does not cover everything owed, the law decides what it settles, not you.
The order is fixed. All principal obligations first, oldest to newest, and only then the accessories, again oldest to newest. Seniority runs from the due date for principal obligations, and from the communication date for accessories and for differences established by ANAF.
The effect is worth spelling out. If an unpaid obligation from March is still open and you pay this month's VAT to the leu, that money does not pay this month's VAT — it goes to March. This month's VAT is now the unpaid one, and it starts accruing charges. The debt grows not because the company stopped paying, but because one old hole swallows every payment after it and turns each new obligation late in turn.
The way out is to clear the oldest item deliberately, as its own payment, rather than to keep paying current amounts on time and wondering why the balance will not move.
What a day of delay costs
| Charge | Per day | Roughly per year | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interest | 0.02% | 7.3% | Art. 174 (5) |
| Late-payment penalty | 0.01% | 3.65% | Art. 176 (2) |
| Both together | 0.03% | ~10.95% | Art. 176 (3) — the penalty does not replace the interest |
| Non-declaration penalty | 0.08% | ~29.2% | Art. 181 (1) — on principal obligations found undeclared or wrongly declared |
All of them run from the day after the due date until the day the debt is settled, that day included. There is no threshold below which they are not charged, and no first-offence exemption.
Two readings of that table matter more than the rates. First, paying the state late is credit at roughly 11% a year, uncapped, with enforcement attached — worse than almost any facility a bank would sell you. Second, the 0.08% line belongs to a different category: it is not the price of paying late, it is the price of declaring wrongly, and it is four times larger.
Not being late without watching a calendar
Three habits do most of the work, and none of them needs software:
- Treat filing and paying as one task. Whoever files D112 should see the money leave in the same session, rather than handing it to someone who will pay "before the 25th".
- Reconcile against the payer's ledger, not against your own list, at least once a quarter. It is the only place an old absorbed obligation becomes visible.
- Decide who releases the money before the 25th, not on it. A payment waiting on an approval nobody is chasing is the most ordinary reason a company pays interest. We wrote about arranging that without bureaucracy in who approves payments in a small company.
And one habit that does need tooling: keep the tax obligations and the supplier invoices in the same list, so a month's outgoings are one decision instead of two errands in two portals. The supplier half is the same problem in a different window — see paying the invoices ANAF delivers, and payment terms and late interest for what being late costs you on the commercial side.
Where OpenPay fits
OpenPay does not pay taxes. It takes the other half of the 25th off your desk: the invoices your suppliers issued you through e-Factura arrive in one list, you approve what should go out, and each payment is initiated with your own bank over open banking — no IBAN re-typed, no second portal. The authorisation stays at your bank, with multi-factor authentication, so nothing leaves without you. The obligations above still go out by Treasury transfer or through ghiseul.ro, exactly as they do today — but the supplier run is already behind you when you get to them.