What a joinery owner actually needs to know.
Three checklists, complete on this page. No email address, no download, no form. They are written for someone who runs a workshop and does not have a finance department — and they are useful whether or not you ever buy anything from us.
Practical guidance, not tax advice. Confirm anything that matters with your accountant or with the Federal Tax Authority directly.
The work is the master data, not the software.
The mandate arrives in phases keyed to business size, and the phase dates are set by the Ministry of Finance — confirm the one that applies to your revenue band with them directly rather than trusting a vendor’s summary, including ours.
What you can do now does not depend on which system you use. Every item on the right is worth fixing regardless, and all of it is tedious to do late.
| Check | Where it bites |
|---|---|
| A TRN recorded against every VAT-registered customer | Master data |
| Unregistered customers and private individuals flagged as such | Master data |
| Every invoice carries Arabic as well as English | Document |
| VAT rounded on each line, then summed — never on the total | Calculation |
| A system that can emit a structured invoice at all, not a PDF | System |
Most of what goes wrong on a return goes wrong before the return.
A progress claim is where a fit-out business gets this wrong, because the figure you are paid and the figure you are taxed on are deliberately different numbers.
- The base is the work certified
- Retention is withheld from the payment, not the supply, so it does not reduce the taxable amount.
- Rounding happens per line
- Round once at the total and you will disagree with the FTA by a few fils on almost every invoice.
- Supplies are split by emirate
- Boxes 1a to 1g want standard-rated supplies broken out by the emirate of supply, not one figure.
- Reverse charge is yours to complete
- ProLedger does not handle import VAT under reverse charge. Boxes 3, 6, 7 and 10 are filled in on the FTA portal.
- The tax point is the certificate, not the payment
- A certified claim is billed and posted when it is certified, whatever month the money lands in.
Worked through with real figures on the UAE compliance page, including the 856.21 a single certificate is under-declared by when VAT is charged on the net rather than on the work certified.
Six things to have in order before you move books.
This list is not specific to ProLedger. Any move between accounting systems needs it, and the firms that find the move painful are almost always the ones that started without the fourth and fifth items.
- An opening trial balance at a clean cut-off date, agreed with whoever signs your accounts
- Customer and supplier master data with TRNs, addresses and payment terms
- Open sales invoices and open purchase invoices, with what has been paid against each
- Retention held to date, contract by contract — usually the figure nobody has in one place
- Contracts in progress: contract sum, certified to date, and what has actually been billed
- Employees with start dates, so end-of-service accrues from the right day
The fastest way to test any of this is one real claim.
Put a certificate you have already filed through the trial and see whether the arithmetic agrees with what you submitted.