Opening a Serbian Company as a Bangladeshi Citizen

The company and your stay are two different applications

Almost every expensive mistake we see starts with treating these as one process. They are not. Registering a company with the Business Registers Agency (APR) is a commercial filing that can be completed while you are in Dhaka, Chattogram or anywhere else. Permission to enter Serbia and live here is an immigration decision, taken by different authorities, on different evidence, on its own timeline.

Serbia's official guidance for foreign business owners is blunt about the link between the two: setting up a company is a valid purpose of residence, but on its own it does not guarantee that a visa or a residence and work permit will be granted. Plan the company on business grounds, because it has to stand up as a business either way. Treat the permit as a separate application that can fail.

The order matters too. You can own and run a Serbian company from Bangladesh and never apply for residence at all, and plenty of owners do exactly that. Residence only becomes necessary when you intend to live in Serbia or to work in the company yourself.

What your passport means for entry

The Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes a visa regime page for each country. The Bangladesh page states that visas are required for holders of ordinary passports and other travel documents. It carries a separate concession for diplomatic and official passports, which is a different passport class, and a private founder should not read it as applying to them.

There is one route around a Serbian visa for short trips, and it depends on what else is already in your passport. Holders of a valid Schengen, EU Member State or United Kingdom visa, or a visa of the United States, may enter, transit and stay in Serbia for up to 90 days in any 180-day period without applying for a Serbian visa, and only within the validity of that other visa. Residence permits also count, but only those issued by Schengen countries, EU Member States or the United States. A United Kingdom residence permit is not on that list, so a Bangladeshi national living in the UK on a residence permit alone is not covered.

Useful as that is for a scouting trip, it does not solve a long stay. The ministry states that a short-stay visa is not grounds to apply for temporary residence unless the Law provides otherwise, and that a foreign national who needs a visa and intends to apply for temporary residence must obtain a long-term visa. Read that sentence twice before booking a short trip on the assumption you can convert it after arrival.

Where a Bangladeshi applicant applies

The Embassy of Serbia in New Delhi is resident in India and additionally covers Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan on a non-residential basis. For a Bangladeshi applicant that is the closest thing to an official answer available.

Now the caveat, and it is the reason this page hedges. The New Delhi page states diplomatic jurisdiction, which is not the same thing as competence to receive and decide visa applications. The Bangladesh visa regime page itself names no mission at all and carries no last-updated date. So contact New Delhi and confirm that it handles visa applications from Bangladesh, which channel it wants, and what it expects from a Bangladeshi applicant, before you pay a fee, book a flight to Delhi or commit to a date.

The general rule behind that route is published. A D visa application can be made through the online form on the government portal or in person at a Serbian diplomatic or consular mission. You apply at the mission competent for your country of residence, and where there is no Serbian mission in your country you apply at a non-residential mission. Each person entered in a passport files a separate application, so a spouse and children are not covered by yours.

On timing, the official guidance asks applicants to apply at least three months before they intend to travel. No decision or processing time is published for a D visa anywhere in the official material we checked, so treat those three months as the lead time the state asks of you, not as a promise about when an answer arrives. Anyone quoting you a guaranteed turnaround is inventing it.

The self-employment route, step by step

If you need a visa to enter Serbia, the official single-permit page states that you first apply for a D visa on the grounds of employment. Self-employment appears under employment as one of the closer reasons, handled through the combined residence and work permit rather than as a basis of its own.

A D visa allows a stay of minimum 90 and maximum 180 days and allows multiple entries. On an employment basis it also carries work rights: the official page states that such a D visa serves as a work permit and lets the holder begin working immediately on arrival. The D visa route for business owners is set out in more detail here.

The single permit is one permit covering both residence and work. It can be issued for up to three years, although nothing official says three years is the normal grant, and a properly completed request is resolved within 15 days from the date it is submitted. Note the qualifier: the 15 days runs from a properly completed request, which is not the same as 15 days from your first attempt.

One in-person step is confirmed for temporary residence. Once the conditions for issuing the permit are met, you must appear in person at the competent authority so biometric data can be collected. Build that trip into your plan rather than discovering it late.

The official document page splits employment into ten sub-grounds, each with its own document set. Five items recur across all of them, and self-employment adds three more.

• A completed visa application form, in the online application or printed if you apply at a mission
• A valid passport, with validity running at least 90 days beyond your intended departure date
• A photograph of the applicant
• Proof that the application fee was paid
• An invitation letter
• For self-employment specifically, the page additionally names a registration certificate, an authorisation or power of attorney, and a landlord or accommodation statement

Two points where people get caught out

First, those document names are category labels rather than the exact legal wording of the official page, and the sub-ground you fall under changes the list materially. Self-employment, employment under a contract and independent professional are three different sets. Check every item against the live page or directly with the mission before you spend money on translation and legalisation.

Second, the basis you enter on matters later. If you arrive on a D visa and then apply for temporary residence, plan on continuing on the same basis. If you need to change basis, confirm with the Ministry of Interior first, because the official portal is not consistent on this point: one government page states it as a rule that the residence application must be on the same basis as the visa, another states only that you can apply on the same grounds. We will not tell you which reading wins, because no official source settles it.

Registering the company from Bangladesh

A foreign citizen can own 100 per cent of a Serbian company. Serbian residence, citizenship and a local partner are all unnecessary, and the registration does not depend on your immigration status at all.

With a special power of attorney notarised in Bangladesh and legalised for use in Serbia, we prepare and file the APR application. You still come to Serbia for a physical KES/QES and bank identification; cloud KES is not offered. Biro Vision's formation fee is €500, while APR, KES, translation, notary, legalisation, travel and other costs are separate.

A clean application is usually decided within a few working days. Allow one to two weeks end to end once document preparation, translation and the bank appointment are counted, and more if legalisation has to travel between countries. A d.o.o. must also record its beneficial owner within 30 days of registration.

Whether a sole trader or a d.o.o. suits you is a business question, not an immigration one, and the two forms differ in liability, cost and tax treatment. The comparison is here.

The business bank account

We prepare the company documentation and coordinate the appointment. The bank decides. Serbia's official guidance is explicit that a bank freely chooses its clients and independently decides whether to enter a business relationship, under its own business policy and its anti-money-laundering obligations. That passage sits on the government page about accounts for natural persons rather than on the business account page, and we flag the difference rather than pretend it says more than it does, but it is the clearest official description of how a bank treats a new client.

Two limits are stated alongside it. A bank may not rely on discriminatory grounds such as citizenship, gender or religion, and on the client's written request it must state in writing the reasons for refusing a business relationship. If you are refused, ask for those reasons in writing rather than moving straight to the next bank.

After registering the company you need a business account. The official page lists what you will most often need: the registration decision, the TIN certificate, a notary-certified OP form, a card of deposited signatures, and a signed contract. The OP form requirement varies from bank to bank, and the page tells you to check your chosen bank's own website for its documentation before going in. A company stamp is not needed to open an account, and if a bank insists on one, that can be reported to the Government or the National Bank contact centre.

The official business-account page says nothing about remote opening. Our workflow requires the foreign director to attend identification in Serbia, and the bank independently decides on the account. Plan that appointment with the physical KES visit. What to expect from Serbian banks as a foreign owner is covered here.

Documents issued in Bangladesh

Serbian authorities and banks work in Serbian. Anything issued in Bangladesh, from a birth certificate to a company extract, will need a translation by a court interpreter, and may need legalising before Serbia accepts it as genuine.

Confirm which legalisation route applies to Bangladeshi documents before you pay for anything, because it decides both the cost and the calendar. Ask the Serbian mission handling your case, or the authority issuing the document, whether an apostille is accepted or full consular legalisation is required. We have not found an official Serbian page that answers this specifically for Bangladesh, and we would rather point you at the competent authority than guess with your money.

One practical detail that costs people weeks: your name must be spelled identically across your passport, the company documents and the bank paperwork. Transliteration differences between Bangla and Latin script are a common cause of rework and refused filings. Fix the spelling once, at the very start, and keep it identical everywhere, including in the power of attorney.

What the company costs to run once it exists

A Serbian company has filing obligations whether or not it trades, so bookkeeping starts in the month the company is registered, not in the month of the first invoice. Our published prices start at 6,900 dinars a month for a flat-rate sole trader and 18,500 dinars a month for a company keeping full books.

Two thresholds matter early. VAT registration becomes mandatory once turnover passes 8,000,000 dinars in 12 months, and a sole trader keeps the flat-rate regime only while annual turnover stays under 6,000,000 dinars. A calculator for both limits is here. The rules for entering the VAT system are explained separately.

If you intend to draw a salary from the company, or to employ anyone in Serbia, payroll and contributions are their own monthly cycle. It is worth reading how ongoing bookkeeping works before you settle on a structure. What a foreign-owned company actually pays in tax is covered on its own page.

What we do, and what we do not do

Biro Vision is an accounting firm in Belgrade. We provide administrative support: company registration and APR filings, document coordination, translation and legalisation logistics, application preparation, and the bookkeeping that follows registration. That is the whole of the offer, and we would rather write it plainly than let you assume more.

We are not lawyers. We do not give legal advice, we do not act as your legal representative, and we do not obtain visas or permits. We do not sponsor employment and we do not sell jobs. If you are looking for work in Serbia rather than a business to run, nothing on this page will help you.

Be careful with anyone who promises that a Serbian company will secure a permit for you, or who tells you the whole immigration process can be handled while you never set foot in Serbia. Setting up a company is a valid purpose of residence, but on its own it does not guarantee that a visa or a residence and work permit will be granted, and the authorities assess the genuine purpose of the stay.