Output and input tax land on every document as it’s raised - so at filing time you’re checking figures, not building them from a spreadsheet.
14 days · no credit card · export any time
Three obligations drive the whole cycle, and a system either serves them or leaves them to you.
The FTA requires registered businesses to file the return and make payment within 28 days of the end of the tax period. Periods are quarterly for most businesses, allocated across staggers by tax-year end, and monthly where the FTA assigns it.
Registration is mandatory where taxable supplies and imports exceed AED 375,000 over the previous 12 months, or are expected to in the next 30 days. Voluntary registration opens at AED 187,500.
UAE tax procedures require tax records to be retained for five years from the end of the relevant tax period - not just the returns, but the documents behind them.
The 28-day window is the one that hurts. It isn’t long enough to rebuild a quarter of trading from exports if the underlying records don’t already carry the tax.
Almost every painful VAT filing traces back to the same four places.
Sales exported from one system, purchases from another, tax worked out in a third, and a total nobody can trace back to a document. It reconciles until the one quarter it doesn’t.
A return posted as a loose adjusting entry instead of against the original invoice leaves output tax overstated and a conversation with your auditor in April. A credit note should reduce receivables against the invoice it belongs to, and reverse its share of tax with it.
Goods and services brought in from outside the UAE carry obligations in both directions on the same return. Handled by hand, it is the single most common source of a corrected filing.
Standard-rated, zero-rated and exempt supplies sitting in the same ledger with nothing distinguishing them until someone sorts the export by memory.
Every sale, purchase, credit note and debit note carries its own tax treatment from the moment it’s raised, and posts to the ledger with it.
Five years is a long time to hope a spreadsheet folder survives a laptop change. Because the tax is a property of the documents rather than a report built over them, the history stays intact and queryable - invoices, credit notes, supplier bills and the journals they generated, each still linked to the others.
If the FTA asks what supported a figure on a return filed three years ago, the answer is a lookup rather than an archaeology project.
There’s no separate tax ledger to reconcile against the real one. VAT is calculated by the same double-entry engine that posts the sale, and sits in the same trial balance you close the month on. The accounting and finance page covers the ledger itself - this page is about what it produces at filing time.
Stock movements and payroll post through the same ledger too, so cost of sale and wage expense are already in the figures you’re filing against. See inventory and HR and payroll.
If you’re evaluating ERP more broadly, start at ERP software in Dubai. If your phase of the e-invoicing mandate is approaching, that’s here.
We don’t claim an approval we don’t hold, and you should be wary of anyone who does without naming the scheme. What matters at filing time is whether the system produces the figures and retains the records the FTA asks for. E-invoicing is different - there is a formal accreditation run by the Ministry of Finance, and we set out our position on it plainly on our e-invoicing page.
No. It prepares the figures and the evidence behind them; you or your accountant submit through EmaraTax. Anyone promising automatic submission is describing something the FTA portal doesn’t offer.
Registration is mandatory above AED 375,000 of taxable supplies and imports over 12 months, and voluntary from AED 187,500. If you’re approaching either, it’s cheaper to have the records right before you register than to reconstruct them after.
The tax point follows the document, not the cheque. PDCs are tracked through receivables and payables from issue to clearance, so a cheque sitting in a drawer doesn’t distort the return.
Yes - role-based, so they see the ledger and the documents without touching payroll or anything else you’d rather they didn’t.
Corporate tax is a separate regime with its own rules and filing. The same records support both, but treat any vendor claiming a one-click corporate tax return with scepticism.
Bring a month of real invoices and see what the return looks like when the tax was never re-keyed. Fourteen days free, no card, export any time.