What do UAE businesses need to do about e-invoicing?
The UAE is moving to a decentralised model in which accredited service providers exchange structured invoices between businesses and report them to the tax authority. Practically, you will need software that can produce invoices as structured data and a connection to an accredited provider — and the date that applies to you depends on your bracket, so check the Ministry of Finance rather than a vendor's marketing.
How the model works
Rather than uploading invoices to a government portal, the UAE has adopted a decentralised approach built on the Peppol framework. Your system sends a structured invoice to an accredited service provider, which delivers it to your customer's provider and reports the data to the tax authority.
The practical consequence: your invoices stop being PDFs that happen to be emailed, and become structured data with required fields. A system that can only produce a printed document has work to do.
What to ask a software vendor
That last question matters. Accreditation is a specific status granted to service providers; most software vendors are not accredited and do not need to be, but they should say so clearly rather than letting the word do work in a sales deck.
- Can your system output an invoice as structured data today, and can I see one?
- Which accredited provider do you connect to, and is that connection built or planned?
- What happens to invoices that fail validation — where do they go and who fixes them?
- Are you accredited yourself, or do you integrate with someone who is?
Where we sit — stated plainly
Paknology is not an accredited service provider. We build business software and integrate it with an accredited provider so invoices can be exchanged and reported correctly. Anyone telling you their ERP is itself accredited is either an ASP, or is describing something else.
If you are choosing systems now, the useful test is not compliance today but whether the data model can support it. Replacing an invoicing system under a deadline is far more expensive than choosing a structured one now.