The ledger everything else stands on
Your VAT return, your tax computation, your audit, your bank facility and your landlord's turnover certificate all read from one ledger. Keeping it right is cheaper than fixing what happens when it isn't.
Bookkeeping is the least glamorous thing an accountant does and the thing everything else stands on. Your VAT return, your Corporate Tax computation, your audit, your bank facility, your landlord's turnover certificate and any conversation about selling the business all read from the same ledger. If it is wrong, they are all wrong in ways that take longer to fix than the bookkeeping would have taken to do.
What we do monthly
- Transaction processing — sales, purchases, expenses and journals posted to a chart of accounts designed for your business rather than a generic template.
- Bank and cash reconciliation — every account, every month, reconciled and evidenced.
- Accounts payable and receivable — supplier ledgers, customer ageing, and a debtors list you can actually chase from.
- Accruals and prepayments — so a quarterly rent payment does not make one month look terrible and two look excellent.
- Fixed asset register — additions, depreciation and disposals tracked rather than reconstructed at year end.
- VAT-ready postings — every transaction coded so the return is generated rather than assembled.
- Month-end close and reporting — a closed period and a management pack, not just a pile of processed entries.
Record-keeping is a legal obligation, not best practice
UAE Corporate Tax law requires taxable persons to maintain records and documents supporting the information in the tax return, and to retain them for seven years following the end of the tax period. VAT law imposes its own record-keeping requirements. Free zone and mainland licensing authorities require financial statements for renewal, and a Qualifying Free Zone Person must have audited statements to keep the 0% rate. "We will sort it out at year end" is not a compliant position.
Penalties for late or incorrect filings. Input VAT lost because no valid tax invoice was ever collected. An audit that costs three times the quote because the auditor rebuilt the year. A bank facility declined on unreliable figures. And the specific, avoidable pain of discovering in month eleven that the business has been less profitable than it looked all year.
How we work
Cloud-based, on your platform or one we recommend — Xero, Zoho Books, QuickBooks or Odoo. Documents flow to us digitally rather than in a shoebox in January. You get a named accountant who knows your business, not a queue. And the close happens on a fixed date each month, so the reporting arrives when it is still useful.
Reviewed 18 August 2026 by Ahmed Nabil Selim. UAE tax rates, thresholds and deadlines change — confirm the position for your period before relying on it.
Bookkeeping — frequently asked questions
Yes. UAE Corporate Tax law requires taxable persons to keep records and documents supporting the return, retained for seven years after the end of the tax period, and VAT-registered businesses have separate record-keeping obligations. Licensing authorities require financial statements for renewal, and mainland companies are generally required to prepare audited accounts under the Commercial Companies Law. The question is not whether to keep books but whether they are kept well enough to rely on.
Seven years following the end of the relevant tax period under the Corporate Tax regime, with comparable retention requirements under VAT law and longer periods for certain real property records. Digital retention is acceptable provided the records are complete, legible and retrievable — which in practice means a cloud accounting platform with attached source documents rather than a folder of scans nobody has indexed.
You can, and for a very small business with few transactions it can work. It stops working when transaction volume rises, when VAT registration adds quarterly deadlines, or when a third party — a landlord, a bank, an auditor, the FTA — starts reading your numbers. The pattern we see most is a business that self-manages competently for two years and then spends more on catch-up and remediation than three years of bookkeeping would have cost. See catch-up bookkeeping.
For most small and mid-sized UAE businesses, Xero and Zoho Books are the strongest general choices, QuickBooks is well established, and Odoo suits businesses that need inventory, manufacturing or heavy operational integration. The right answer depends on transaction volume, whether you need stock and POS integration, multi-entity requirements and your team's capability. What matters more than the brand is that it is configured properly — a well-set-up mid-tier system beats a badly configured premium one every time. See software setup.
Want a straight answer on your position?
Tell us about the business — licence, size, systems and where things currently stand. We will tell you what you are obliged to do and what it costs to have it handled.
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