AWRA OpsHub Search

Market hub

Operating in the Caribbean

A tax rate that depends on what you sell, a return that is a claim rather than a bill, and compliance dates that belong to each supplier.

Guides
2
Topics
1
Markets
3
VAT range
12–15%

What is different about operating here

Three English-speaking markets with three genuinely different problems, and none of them is the one a vendor would put on a brochure. In Jamaica the General Consumption Tax has a standard rate, a higher rate on telephone services and handsets, and a reduced effective rate in tourism — so the ordinary question "what is the rate here" has no single answer, and a system that stores one rate per country is correct and useless at the same time. In Trinidad and Tobago the rate is uniform but the direction is not: zero-rating is broad enough that a large share of registered businesses are reclaiming tax rather than remitting it, which makes input tax the number the whole return turns on, filed every two months. In Guyana the consumption tax is unremarkable and the compliance load sits in procurement instead, where the Local Content Act makes supplier eligibility a certificate that renews on its own anniversary — a hundred suppliers, a hundred dates, no season. What the three share is a shape rather than a subject: each is a case where the thing that matters is not the number but the unit it is measured in, which is also why each of them found something wrong in our own schema.

Three things that catch teams out

A rate can be correct for the country and wrong for you

Where a tax has sector rates, the national headline figure is what your system will provision you with and it may be several points from the rate you actually charge. This is not a stale-data problem and cannot be fixed by looking anything up — ask where a non-standard rate is stored, and treat "the person raising the document sets it" as the honest answer it is.

Ask which direction the tax is travelling

If you export or your supplies are zero-rated, your return is a claim and input tax is the number that matters. Most systems record output tax carefully and put purchase tax into the cost of goods, where no report can retrieve it. One question resolves it: show me the field, on a purchase document, that holds the tax I was charged.

A compliance date that belongs to the supplier, not to you

Certificates that renew on the anniversary of issuance defeat every review interval, and they lapse silently — nothing happens on the day, and the approved list looks identical afterwards. Ask what the system does when the date passes, and take "it appears in a report" as the non-answer it is.

Tax and currency presets for this region

These are the sales-tax presets AWRA OpsHub ships with, 3 of the 91 countries covered in total. They are headline national rates and a starting point for configuration — reduced, zero-rated and exempt categories still need setting up against your own chart of accounts, and rates change with each finance act.

Market Currency Tax Standard rate
Jamaica JMD Jamaican Dollar VAT 15%
Trinidad and Tobago TTD Trinidad and Tobago Dollar VAT 12.5%
Guyana GYD Guyanese Dollar VAT 14%

Help Center

Need a quick answer while you read?

Run inventory, procurement, assets, sales, and field work with approved AWRA guidance for setup, migration, integrations, security, pricing, and support.

Search all approved AWRA public help articles.

Open Help Center