Corporate tax is a record-keeping requirement wearing a tax rate.

• Corporate tax runs at 9% on taxable income above AED 375,000, and 0% below it
• Records and documents supporting your filings must be kept for at least seven years
• The return is due within nine months of the end of the tax period
• Small Business Relief: eligible businesses with revenue up to AED 3 million can elect to be treated as having no taxable income, extended to the end of 2029, and they still register, file and keep records

The last line is the one businesses misread. Relief from the tax is not relief from the paperwork: the registration, the return and the seven years of records apply, and eligibility itself is something you evidence from your books.

Not a folder of PDFs and not one spreadsheet per year. It means being able to show, years later, how a filed number was produced: the invoices and bills behind it, the payments against them, the opening balances it started from, and who changed what along the way.

• Opening balances signed off by your finance lead at go-live, so every later number has a defensible starting point
• Source documents attached to the transactions they created, rather than filed beside them
• One chart of accounts and one tax configuration, reviewed and signed rather than assumed
• An audit trail: records show who created and changed them, which is what makes a number defensible seven years on
• Access control, so the person who approves is not the person who edits history
• Backups that have actually been restore-tested, because a record you cannot produce is a record you do not have

The work we build for clients in this area is named, not vague: reading invoices, expenses and bank statements into the accounting system, and generating trial balance, VAT and corporate tax reporting from those source documents. The machinery produces the records and the drafts; your accountant owns the positions. Outputs remain subject to your finance professional’s review, and we would not have it any other way.

Verify current thresholds, deadlines and relief conditions against the Federal Tax Authority’s publications before acting, and take tax positions with your tax adviser. We implement the systems that keep the records; we are not a tax adviser.