An introduction is worth money in Georgia in a way that almost never gets written down. A cousin in Munich asks whether anyone in Kakheti rents guest rooms for the harvest. A neighbour's son in Athens wants a flat in Batumi and does not know a single agent. A company somewhere in Europe needs three Georgian-speaking developers by October. You know the people on both ends of each of those sentences. What you probably do not know is what happens on the day one of them tries to pay you for making the call.
That is the part nobody explains. The commission is the easy half. The half that goes wrong is administrative, in four specific places: the status you hold, whether your activity is permitted inside that status, whether Georgian tax applies to money arriving from a company that has never set foot in the country, and whether the payer can reach a Georgian bank account at all. Settle those four before the first payment and the rest is arithmetic.
One practical note first. Introduction income is lumpy by nature — nothing for six weeks, then two deals inside a fortnight. Apps such as I am Beezy, where you are paid for time spent viewing content, do not replace a commission, but they keep something arriving in the weeks when nothing closes.
Where introduction fees actually come from in Georgia
Before any paperwork, be honest about which introductions anyone will pay for. A finder fee exists where the seller has a real cost of acquiring customers and no cheap way to reach yours. That list is narrower than it sounds.
The sectors where a finder is genuinely useful
Property in Batumi is the obvious one: the city holds 246,267 residents as of 1 January 2026 according to Sakstat, it is the country's only large port and seaside city, and it grew faster than anywhere else in Georgia over the previous two years. Buyers who are not in the country need someone who is. Wine and agrotourism in Kakheti is the second, and it has a tax feature described further down that no other sector has. Tbilisi, with 1,369,356 residents and 34.7% of the national population, concentrates the service businesses that pay for qualified leads. Freelance technical work is the fourth, and there the introduction is usually a person rather than a purchase.
The diaspora is a channel, not a product
If your contacts abroad are your advantage, be precise about what that advantage is. It is not access to money. It is that you can verify, in Georgian and on the ground, something a person 3,000 kilometres away cannot: whether the guesthouse exists, whether the developer has finished a building before, whether the person on the other end answers the phone in September. Sell the verification. It is the part that is hard to replace and the part a serious payer will pay for repeatedly.
What you are actually selling
An introduction that closes is worth a fee. A name and an email address is worth nothing, and charging for it is how new introducers burn their contacts. Decide which of the two you provide, and price only the first.
Do you need to register before you take your first commission?
Short answer: for anything beyond a one-off favour, yes, and the order matters. Registration comes first, tax status second, and the second is not automatic.
The individual entrepreneur is the container
Georgia's special tax regimes do not attach to a private individual out of thin air. The small business status of Article 88.1 of the Tax Code is open only to an individual entrepreneur — a meits'arme pizikuri p'iri — which means you register that capacity first, through the Public Service Hall network or the register of entrepreneurial entities. The micro-business status of Article 84 is the exception: it is available to a natural person working alone, with no employees at all.
Micro-business at 0%, small business at 1%
These are two different regimes and people confuse them constantly. Micro-business caps gross income at 30,000 GEL per calendar year, forbids employing anyone, and under Article 86 of the Tax Code the holder pays no income tax whatsoever. Small business caps gross income at 500,000 GEL per calendar year and taxes it at 1% under Article 90.1. The threshold that decides between them is 30,000 GEL of annual receipts, and if you cross it you have fifteen days to request small business status or you fall out of the special regimes entirely and back to the general 20% rate under Article 85.3.
What registration does not do for you
Being registered does not make a commission collectable, does not oblige a foreign network to pay you, and does not rescue you from a contract you signed. It settles your position with the Revenue Service, and nothing else.
The word that disqualifies you: consulting
This is where most Georgian introducers lose the 1% rate without ever being told, and it turns on a single word in the description of their activity.
The banned list, read in full
Government Decree No. 415 of 29 December 2010 lists, in its Annex 4, the seven categories of activity closed to small business status: licensed or permit-bearing activities, activities requiring significant investment through excisable goods production, currency exchange, medical practice, architecture, legal and notarial work, audit, consulting including tax consulting, gambling, and the supply of personnel. Annex 2 of the same decree closes an equivalent list to micro-business status, which means a person who describes their activity as consulting has no access to either preferential regime.
How to describe what you do instead
An introducer is not a consultant, and the difference is real rather than cosmetic. A consultant is paid for advice. An introducer is paid on the occurrence of a transaction between two other parties. If your fee only exists when a deal closes, say that in your contract and in your activity description, and keep any advisory work out of the same invoice. If you genuinely do both, the honest route is to ask the Revenue Service in writing which side your income falls on, rather than guess and find out during an audit.
Licensed sectors and betting
Gambling appears on both banned lists, and betting affiliate programmes recruit hard in Georgia. Before accepting one, put the question to the Revenue Service in writing: does commission earned from promoting a licensed gambling operator fall inside the excluded category? Do not accept an answer from the operator's own affiliate manager. The same caution applies to any sector that requires a licence, because the exclusion is drafted around the activity, not around who holds the licence.
| Criterion | Micro-business status | Small business status |
|---|---|---|
| Who may hold it | A natural person working alone | Only a registered individual entrepreneur |
| Annual gross income cap | 30,000 GEL | 500,000 GEL, or 700,000 GEL for a wine tourism or agrotourism operator |
| Rate on taxable income | None — no income tax is paid | 1%, rising to 3% above the cap for the rest of that year |
| Employees | Not permitted | Permitted |
| Filing rhythm | Once a year, before 1 April | Every month, by the 15th |
| Consulting activity | Excluded (Decree 415, Annex 2) | Excluded (Decree 415, Annex 4) |
Is a commission from a foreign company taxed in Georgia?
Almost everything written online about this is wrong in the same direction, and the mistake is expensive because it encourages people not to declare.
The territorial rule is real, and narrower than advertised
Article 82.1 of the Tax Code does exempt income received by a resident individual that is not Georgian-source income. That is a genuine territorial rule and it is why Georgia has the reputation it has. It is also where most articles stop.
What Article 104 does to your invoice
Article 104.1 treats a service as rendered in Georgia when the provider and the recipient are in different states and the provider is a resident of Georgia, unless the provider rendered it through a permanent establishment abroad and can prove it. A service you perform from Georgia for a client located anywhere else is therefore Georgian-source income, and Article 90.3 pulls it straight into the taxable base of the small business status. The honest version of the sentence is not that your foreign commissions are untaxed. It is that they are taxed at 1% rather than 20%, which is a better outcome and a completely different statement.
The threshold that arrives five times earlier
Value added tax is a separate track. Registration becomes compulsory once taxable operations reach 100,000 GEL over any continuous twelve calendar months, with two working days to notify the Revenue Service under Article 165.1, and the Georgian rate is 18% under Article 166. That threshold is one fifth of the small business cap. An introducer growing quickly can be paying 1% income tax and charging 18% VAT at the same time, and the second obligation is the one that surprises people.
Getting paid from abroad into a Georgian account
The last failure point is mechanical. A commission you cannot receive is not income.
Your account number is an IBAN, and an IBAN settles nothing on its own
The National Bank of Georgia states that IBAN use has been compulsory in Georgia since 1 January 2013, and a Georgian IBAN is 22 characters long, beginning with the country code GE. An IBAN is an account number format, not a membership card for any particular payment scheme, and Georgia is not a member of the European Union — it has held candidate status since December 2023, with no accession date. So do not assume a payer's usual European transfer will simply arrive: ask them.
Three questions to put to the payer in writing
Ask which payment method they use for Georgia specifically, in which currency the payment leaves, and what their minimum payout balance is. A network that has never paid a Georgian account before will discover its own limitations using your money. And do not plan around foreign digital banking apps whose availability in Georgia you have not personally verified — an account at a Georgian bank, with a GE IBAN, is the arrangement that certainly works.
| Before you sign | What a workable answer looks like |
|---|---|
| Activity description in your registration | Intermediation on completed transactions, with no advisory element |
| Tax status requested | Micro-business or small business, chosen against your expected annual receipts |
| Filing dates in your calendar | The 15th of every month for small business, before 1 April for micro-business |
| How the commission reaches you | A named method that the payer has already used for a Georgian account |
| Currency and conversion | Stated in the contract, with the conversion cost identified as yours or theirs |
| When the fee becomes due | A defined event — signature, delivery, payment by the end client |
The conversion is your cost, not a detail
Money arriving from abroad converts into lari before you spend it, and the cost of that conversion is a term of your relationship with your bank rather than a feature of the commission. Ask for the applied rate and the fee in writing after your first payment, and compare it against the National Bank's published indicative rate for that day. If the gap is large, that is a bank conversation, not a tax one.
Covering the gap between introductions with I am Beezy
The structural weakness of introduction income is timing. Deals close when they close, and the months in between are when most people give up on the activity entirely.
What the mechanism is
I am Beezy is an app on which you view content — videos, articles, adverts — and each view generates a small amount, paid to the payment method you already use. There is no deal to close, no counterpart to persuade and no waiting for someone else's signature, which makes it the opposite of a commission in every respect that matters here. It is also a useful calibration: once you have been paid by one service, you know what a normal payment flow looks like, and a network that behaves differently stands out immediately.
The order of magnitude, in lari
The reference range across the platform is 5 to 15 euros a day. Converted at the National Bank of Georgia's indicative rate of 3.0260 GEL to the euro on 6 August 2026, that is roughly 15 to 45 GEL a day. The lari floats and the National Bank describes its own published rate as indicative rather than binding, so check the rate of the day before you plan around the figure. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a promise.
Where to start this week
Do three things in order. Write down which introductions you can actually verify on the ground, because that is your product. Decide between micro-business and small business against a realistic estimate of a full year of receipts, and register the entrepreneur capacity if the second applies. Then open the payment question with your first payer before you promote anything, not after. If you want a small, predictable amount arriving while the first introduction is still in progress, I am Beezy is one way to keep the gap covered without adding another deal to chase.
