Reference material,
kept current.

Late registration penalty AED 10,000

Filed through EmaraTax

Revenue up to AED 3m, extended to tax periods ending on or before 31 Dec 2029

Rolling 12 month test, not calendar year

Period assigned by the FTA at registration

Go live 1 Jan 2027

Go live 1 Jul 2027

Go live 1 Oct 2027

Also required above AED 50m revenue for CT

Master and local file above OECD style thresholds

Books, invoices, contracts, customs documents

The Federal Tax Authority's online portal where UAE businesses register, file and pay corporate tax and VAT. Your business keeps its own credentials; anyone filing for you should be working inside your account, not theirs.

The UAE federal tax on business profits: 0% on taxable income up to AED 375,000 and 9% above it, in force for financial years starting on or after 1 June 2023.

A free zone company that meets the conditions for keeping the 0% corporate tax rate on qualifying income: adequate substance, qualifying income, transfer pricing compliance, audited accounts. Fail a condition and the whole benefit can fall away for five years.

The categories of free zone income that can enjoy the 0% rate, broadly income from other free zone persons and from qualifying activities. Revenue from mainland UAE customers is the classic way companies quietly disqualify themselves.

The tolerance for non qualifying revenue a free zone company may earn without losing 0% status: the lower of AED 5 million or 5% of total revenue.

An election letting UAE businesses with revenue up to AED 3 million be treated as having no taxable income for the period. Elected inside each return. Extended by Ministerial Decision 131 of 2026 to tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029. Not available to Qualifying Free Zone Persons.

The UAE's 5% value added tax. Registration is mandatory once taxable supplies pass AED 375,000 on a rolling 12 month basis, voluntary from AED 187,500.

The monthly or quarterly window the FTA assigns for your VAT returns. Returns and payment are due 28 days after each period ends.

The UAE mandate replacing PDF and email invoices with structured data exchanged through accredited providers under the Peppol five corner model. Rollout runs in waves from 2027.

The UAE specific Peppol invoice format every e-invoice must conform to. Required fields include the buyer's TRN, an emirate code and an AED amount on every line regardless of invoice currency.

The FTA accredited intermediary that validates and transmits your e-invoices. Appointing one is cheap and quick; making your data clean enough to survive validation is the real project.

The e-invoicing architecture where supplier, supplier's provider, buyer's provider, buyer and the tax authority each see the invoice. Nothing arrives by email; everything is validated in transit.

Tax Registration Number: the identifier the FTA issues on registration. E-invoicing turns a missing or wrong customer TRN into a hard validation failure rather than a cosmetic one.

The rules requiring related party transactions to be priced as if between independents, with disclosure alongside the corporate tax return and documentation above thresholds. It applies to free zone groups more often than they expect.

Having reconciliations, schedules and support prepared before the external auditors arrive, so the audit is a review rather than an excavation. Distinct from the audit itself, which only a licensed audit firm may perform.

The process of finalising a month's books: reconciling accounts, posting accruals, producing statements. A disciplined close finishes in days; an undisciplined one quietly costs a week of every month.

Matching the bank statement to the books, line by line. The single fastest way to find missing revenue, duplicate payments and quiet fraud, and a prime candidate for automation.

Monthly statements produced for decision makers rather than regulators: P&L, balance sheet, cash, and the handful of numbers that actually drive the business.

The monthly or quarterly bundle a leadership team reads before deciding anything: performance against budget, cash runway, risks. Good ones are short. Bad ones are forty pages nobody opens.

Senior finance leadership bought by the day rather than the year: forecasting, pricing, banking relationships, board work, without the AED 60k a month hire.

Financial planning and analysis: budgets, rolling forecasts and the why behind the numbers, as opposed to accounting's record of what already happened.

A rolling weekly cash forecast covering one quarter: long enough to see a crunch coming, short enough to stay accurate. The standard tool for cash tight or fast growing companies.

The cash trapped between paying suppliers and being paid by customers. Most profitable but broke stories are working capital stories.

Enterprise resource planning software (Zoho, Odoo, SAP, Oracle and kin) tying finance to operations. The acronym matters less than whether the modules talk to each other without a human retyping numbers.

Software talking to software directly, replacing the export, edit, import loop. If a person moves data between two systems on a schedule, that loop is a candidate.

The automated path from source systems to finished report, with validation on the way. The difference between a live dashboard and a spreadsheet someone refreshes on Fridays.

0% on taxable income up to AED 375,000 and 9% above it. Qualifying free zone persons can keep 0% on qualifying income, subject to strict conditions.

Only while it remains a Qualifying Free Zone Person: adequate substance in the zone, income within the qualifying categories, non qualifying revenue inside the de minimis limit (the lower of AED 5m or 5% of revenue), audited accounts and transfer pricing compliance. Significant mainland revenue is the most common disqualifier.

Nine months after your financial year end. A 31 December year end files by 30 September of the following year, through EmaraTax.

An election treating businesses with revenue up to AED 3 million as having no taxable income for the period. You still register and file, and you make the election inside each return. Ministerial Decision 131 of 2026 extended it to tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029. It is not available to Qualifying Free Zone Persons, so if you hold QFZP status the two are mutually exclusive.

When taxable supplies pass AED 375,000 over any rolling 12 months, or are expected to in the next 30 days. Voluntary registration opens at AED 187,500.

Businesses with revenue of AED 50m and above appoint an accredited provider by 30 October 2026 and go live 1 January 2027. Below AED 50m: appoint by 31 March 2027, live 1 July 2027. Government entities: 31 March 2027 and 1 October 2027.

Structured invoice data in the PINT AE format exchanged through an accredited provider: correct customer TRNs, UAE emirate codes, a transaction type flag most accounting packages do not store, and an AED amount on every line whatever the invoice currency. The provider is the easy part; the data cleanup is the project.

Most free zones require audited financial statements at licence renewal, and corporate tax requires them above AED 50m revenue and for qualifying free zone persons. We prepare companies for audit; the audit itself must be performed by a firm registered in the Ministry of Economy register of practising auditors, which we are not.

We prepare VAT and corporate tax returns and file them using your own EmaraTax credentials, with your review. We are not an FTA registered Tax Agent and do not represent clients before the FTA.

The work a full time CFO would do: forecasting, cash strategy, pricing, board reporting, bank conversations. Delivered a few days a month by senior people, at a fraction of the AED 45 to 70k monthly cost of the hire.

Usually above or beside them. Bookkeepers record; we build the reporting, forecasting and automation layer on top, or act as the senior review your bookkeeper does not have. We are equally happy handing a cleaned up function back to an in house team.

Zoho Books, QuickBooks Online, Xero and Odoo daily; Oracle and SAP data on the engineering side; Power BI and Looker Studio on top. We build in your stack, on your licences, and everything we build stays yours.

A Strategy Meeting: you pick a day, we call you on it. Twenty minutes on your close, reporting, cash visibility and deadlines, and you leave with two or three concrete actions whether or not we ever work together.