Trinidad and Tobago · Caribbean

If you export, your VAT return is not a bill. It is a claim — and it is built from the tax on your supplier bills.

Trinidad and Tobago charges VAT at 12.5% and collects returns every two months. But zero-rating here is wide — basic foods, crude oil, natural gas, exports — so a great many registered businesses charge little or no tax on what they sell while paying it on almost everything they buy. For those businesses the return is a refund claim, the balance is a receivable, and the whole exercise rests on input tax: what you paid, to whom, on which invoice, in which period. We record that tax on every supplier bill, per line, against the supplier and their own invoice number. This page is about exactly how far that record goes, and what we can add to carry it the rest of the way to a return.

The rate: 12.5%, administered by the Board of Inland Revenue, with returns every two months — six a year, due the last day of the month after the period ends.
The subject: Zero rating here is broad. If you export, your return is a claim rather than a payment, and the number it turns on is what you were charged rather than what you charged.
What we get right: The sales side. Rates are stored per line, so zero-rated and standard-rated supplies sit in one ledger without a second set of books.
The purchase side: Input tax on every supplier bill, line by line. For a business in a standing credit position that is the number the whole return is built from. Named below beside the four other documents that hold a rate, with what we can add to turn it into a credit position.

See both returns Talk to us about Trinidad and Tobago

One rate, two directions

Two businesses, one rate, opposite returns

The same 12.5%, the same bi-monthly cycle, and two entirely different relationships with the Board of Inland Revenue. Which one you are is decided by what you sell, and it changes what your accounting system is actually for.

Filing period Every two months — six returns a year, due the last day of the month following the period end.

A standard-rated domestic trader

SellsCharges 12.5% on sales

BuysPays 12.5% on purchases

ReturnOwes the difference

Output tax. The system needs to get what you charged right, and it does.

An exporter or zero-rated supplier

SellsCharges 0% on sales

BuysPays 12.5% on purchases

ReturnReclaims the whole of it

Input tax. The system needs to get what you were charged right, and it is recorded per line on every supplier bill.

A business in the second column is in a standing credit position: it is financing its own input tax from the moment it pays a supplier until the moment its claim is settled. That is a structural feature of being zero-rated in a country with a broad zero-rating list, not a criticism of anybody, and it is the reason the evidence behind a claim is worth more here than the convenience of producing it.

Which column you are in is not always stable. A domestic trader that wins an export contract moves between them, and can be in both at once — which is precisely the case where tax on both sides has to be held as tax rather than folded into prices.

Our own schema, counted

Where tax on a purchase is recorded, document by document

We looked for this rather than remembering it, because the claim is checkable and worth being exact about. Across the whole product, a tax rate is held in six kinds of document. Three are sales. Three are purchases — and one of those, the supplier bill, is the record a claim is built from.

Customer invoices

A tax rate on every line

Sales

Point-of-sale receipts

Tax on every retail line

Sales

Customer quotes and sales orders

A tax rate on every line

Sales

Supplier quotations

Tax held on the document

Purchases

Supplier bills

A rate and the tax on every line, totalled on the bill

Purchases

Supplier returns

A rate and the tax reversed out of input tax on goods sent back

Purchases

The supplier bill is the one that matters here. Each line carries its own rate and its own tax, the bill carries the total, and the bill is held against the supplier and their own invoice number — unique per supplier, so the same invoice cannot be entered, or claimed, twice. A bill that is not against a purchase order posts its tax to an Input Tax Recoverable account when it is approved, so the tax is held as an asset rather than inside cost. Expenses carry a tax amount too, without a rate, and that amount stays in the expense rather than reaching the input tax account.

What that means for a claim

Input tax is recorded as tax when the bill is captured, per supplier and per bill date, so the evidence for a claim is built by the transaction rather than gathered at the end of the period.
For bills outside a purchase order — rent, utilities, services — the tax reaches the ledger as Input Tax Recoverable, alongside Taxes Payable, where the output tax on your invoices lands.
For bills against a purchase order, the tax is on the bill while the ledger entry for the goods was made at receipt, at the order price. Posting that tax to the same Input Tax account is work we can add.
Landed cost still folds duty, freight and any tax entered against a consignment into unit cost — right for costing, wrong for reclaiming — so tax you mean to claim belongs on a bill rather than in a landed cost.

What we can add, and it is the last mile rather than the record

Our Liberia page reads the same records from the other direction: Liberia's GST cannot be reclaimed, so until January tax on a purchase there is part of what it cost. In Trinidad and Tobago input tax is a receivable, and for a business in a standing credit position it may be the largest current asset it has. The record of it is in our system, on the bill. What we can add is the step from the record to the return: a view that nets input tax against output tax for a two-month period and shows your credit position, and posting the tax on purchase-order bills to the same Input Tax account so that one balance holds all of it.

Both are commissionable on the usual terms — a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed first. What we will not do is imply that landed cost is a substitute for the bill, because it is designed to do the opposite of what a claim needs: it puts tax into the cost of goods, and a claim needs it kept out.

What this costs, six times a year

Four problems that belong to whoever assembles the claim

None of these are exotic and none of them are anybody's fault. They are the ordinary consequences of keeping what you were charged anywhere other than on the transaction that charged it.

A receivable that lives in a spreadsheet

For a business in a standing credit position the VAT claim is often one of the larger current assets on the balance sheet, and in most systems it is assembled by hand from supplier invoices at the end of every second month. The number is real, material and outside the accounting system.

Evidence, six times a year

A claim is only as good as the invoices behind it. Every two months somebody gathers them, checks the supplier is registered, checks the period, and rebuilds a total that the system could have carried all along.

Moving between the two columns

A domestic trader that wins an export contract is suddenly partly zero-rated, apportioning input tax between the two. That is the point where a manual method stops scaling and where errors become expensive rather than annoying.

Cost that hides the tax inside it

Landed cost is the right way to value goods and the wrong way to hold a claim, because it folds duty, freight and tax into one unit cost on purpose. Every system that does costing well makes reclaiming harder unless it keeps the tax separate — and most do not.

Operations in Trinidad and Tobago

Six times a year, somebody rebuilds a file that the transactions should already have been carrying.

The claim argument is above and it is the reason this market gets a page. What it costs operationally is a cycle. Every couple of months somebody gathers the invoices, checks them against what was received, and assembles the evidence — not because the work is difficult but because the evidence was never attached to anything. A record built by the transaction is the same file, produced by having done the work once.

Receiving

Order, receipt and invoice matched as they happen

Three-way matching with your own tolerances, and the differences raised at the point of receipt. This is the mechanism that makes the periodic assembly a retrieval instead of an investigation — the checking already happened, in front of the goods.

Documents

The supporting document held against the transaction it supports

Attached to the record rather than remembered, retrievable by the transaction rather than by whoever filed it or the month it landed in. A file gathered from an inbox is only ever as complete as somebody's memory of what to look for.

Suppliers

Supplier records that carry their own paperwork

Registrations and documents on the supplier with expiry dates the system watches, so a counterparty's standing is a field rather than something re-established each cycle.

Landed cost

Cost components kept visible inside the total

Landed cost is the right way to value goods and it folds several things into one number. Components stay identifiable on the receipt, so valuing the stock correctly does not mean losing sight of what went into it.

Reporting

By period, project and cost centre, on demand

The same underlying records queried by whichever period is being asked about, rather than a pack assembled per cycle and re-assembled when the question changes slightly.

Sales documents

A rate recorded on every line, at capture

Held per line rather than applied per document, which is what a business moving between rated and zero-rated work needs — the mix is a property of the lines, and reconstructing it later from totals does not work.

The boundary is the one the honesty ledger draws below and it belongs beside the first card: we hold the detail a claim is built from; we do not prepare, apportion or submit it. Whether a particular input is claimable, and how a partly zero-rated business should apportion, is your adviser's call — and a vendor willing to make it in a sales meeting has told you something about how they sell.

Scope, in three parts rather than two

What runs today, what we would build, and where we stop on purpose

Three columns, because "no" means two entirely different things and one list hides which is which. The middle column has a price. The right-hand column is work we would decline from a paying customer, and it is the one to demand from every other vendor on your list.

Scope in Trinidad and Tobago, on both sides of the ledger

Running in the product today

Supplier bills with tax on every line, a bill total, and the supplier's invoice number held unique per supplier — and on bills outside a purchase order, the tax posted to Input Tax Recoverable rather than to cost.
Purchase orders, receipts and three-way matching, with variances surfaced rather than quietly absorbed.
Landed cost open after receipt, so late duty and freight invoices still reach the goods — costing, not a tax record.
Supplier records with documents attached, so the invoice behind a transaction is retrievable from the transaction.
Output tax stored per sales line, so zero-rated and standard-rated supplies coexist without a second set of books.
Multi-currency documents and reporting, and reporting periods that need not be calendar months.

More we can add — and commissionable now

A credit position, by filing period. Input Tax Recoverable and Taxes Payable already sit in the chart of accounts side by side. A view that nets them for a two-month period, and shows whether the period ends in a payment or a claim, is the thing you would actually want on a dashboard — and the largest item on this page.
Tax on the purchase order itself, so the expected input tax is known before the bill arrives. A bill against a purchase order already posts its tax to Input Tax Recoverable when it is approved, so every claimable amount sits in one balance; tax on the order is being built.
A VAT return output for the Board of Inland Revenue, bi-monthly or otherwise. Reporting cuts to any dates; a statutory filing period, and a return laid out for the Board, are the build. Part boundary as well as backlog, and the next column says why.
Apportionment between zero-rated and standard-rated activity. A business that is partly both works out the split outside the system today. Genuinely commissionable, and the next thing we would build here after the credit position.
A Trinidadian payroll engine. Income tax tables, NIS calculation and filing. Labour cost is attributed to projects and cost centres, which is the reporting half rather than the calculation half. Kenya remains the only market where we maintain a statutory engine.

What we would decline, and would rather say now

We will not advise on refund timing or how to plan around it. That a business in a credit position is financing its own input tax is a structural fact we will state. How long a claim takes to settle, and what to do about it, is a treasury question and a political one, and a software vendor with an opinion on it is a software vendor selling something.
We will not present landed cost as an input tax record. It folds tax into unit cost by design. Using it as evidence for a claim would be using a tool for the opposite of its purpose, and we would rather lose the argument than help set that up.
We will not file, correspond with, or represent you to the Board of Inland Revenue. No practising credential, no agency. Producing the data your adviser files from is the part we would do.
We will not tell you whether a supply is zero-rated. The list is broad, it moves, and the consequences of getting it wrong land on you rather than on us.

The credit position and the purchase-order posting are the pieces of work behind the first three items above, and they build on records the product already keeps rather than on a new data model. Commissionable now on the usual terms: a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed before anything begins. The reason to treat that as a real offer is Kenya, where eTIMS transmission and a maintained statutory payroll engine were both built to specification for a single market and are now part of the product. A date belongs in a quote rather than on a public page.

If you are standard-rated and domestic, almost none of this affects you and the page has overstated your problem. If you export, it is the first thing to ask us — and every other vendor — about.

How this starts

Three moves, and the first is your last return

Work out which column you are in

Take your last return. If the bottom line was a claim rather than a payment, input tax is the number your system most needs to hold, and you should be testing every vendor on it rather than on invoicing.

Ask where tax on a purchase is stored

Ask to be shown the field, on the screen, on a supplier bill. Not a report — the field. Ours is a rate and an amount on every bill line, and we will show it to you. It is a fair and revealing question to put to anyone else on your list, and the hesitation is usually more informative than the answer.

Time how long your last claim took to assemble

Not to be paid — to be assembled. If gathering the evidence for one bi-monthly claim takes a person more than a day, that is the recurring cost any system should be measured against, six times a year.

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Questions we are asked here

Straight answers, starting with the purchase side

Can your system produce our bi-monthly VAT return?

Not as a finished return, and there are two separate reasons rather than one. Two halves, and they have different answers. The first is work we can add: input tax is recorded per line on every supplier bill, and on bills outside a purchase order it is posted to Input Tax Recoverable, but a view that nets it against output tax for a two-month period is the build — commissionable, on a written specification with a timeline and a price. The second is a boundary: we produce no filing output for any authority in this market and do not represent you to the Board. Even with that view built, the return is something your adviser prepares from our data rather than something we submit.

We export almost everything. Is this system wrong for us?

For the part of your business that matters most, the record is there and the last step is still to build, and you should weigh that. Your sales side is well served — zero-rated and standard-rated lines coexist, rates are stored per line, multi-currency is ordinary. Your purchase side is where your money is: every supplier bill carries its rate and its tax per line, against the supplier and their invoice number, with the matched order, the receipt and the documents behind it — which is the evidence a claim rests on. What we would add is the netting of that into a credit position for the period, and the posting of tax on purchase-order bills to the input tax account. Both are commissionable. Whether that is enough today is your call, and we would rather you made it now.

Does landed cost not already capture the VAT we paid on imports?

It captures the money and puts it in the wrong place for this purpose. Landed cost exists to fold freight, duty and tax into the unit cost of goods so your margins are honest, and it does that well. A reclaim needs the opposite: the tax held out of cost, identified as tax, attributable to a period and a supplier. Using landed cost as a claim record would understate your margins and produce a total nobody could defend; the tax you mean to claim goes on the supplier bill, where it is held as tax. A boundary rather than a backlog — we will not repurpose it, because the two jobs genuinely conflict.

How long do VAT refunds take here?

Not our question to answer, and we would be suspicious of a software vendor who offered a figure. What we will state is the structural part, because it affects what your system needs to do: a business in a standing credit position is financing its own input tax from the moment it pays a supplier until the claim settles, whenever that is. That makes the speed and quality of your evidence worth real money, which is an argument about record-keeping rather than about anybody's administration.

Our filing period is two months. Does that break anything?

No, and it is worth being precise about why, because we have written elsewhere about a period that does break things. Reporting in this system can be cut to whatever dates you like, including a two-month window, so there is nothing to work around. We have no concept of a statutory filing period because we do not file — that is a boundary rather than a limitation. Our Papua New Guinea page describes a genuinely different case, where a fortnightly pay cycle is refused by a unique key in the database; this is not that, and we would rather not borrow the drama.

Is foreign exchange going to be a problem for us?

It is a real feature of operating here and it is not a software problem, so we will keep this to one line: we will report accurately in whatever currencies you transact in, and we will not advise you on sourcing, timing or holding foreign currency. Our Malawi page sets out at length why we hold that line rather than making a feature of it.

Is English-language software a limitation here?

No. English is the official language of Trinidad and Tobago, so the English-only interface — a real constraint on our Francophone and Arabic-market pages — is not one here.

Why would we buy from Nairobi?

Possibly you would not, and the honest case against us is on this page rather than hidden from it. There is no local office, no implementation partner, and the largest piece of work we have named — netting input tax into a credit position — is directly relevant to exporters, who are much of the market. The time zone works — a Port of Spain morning reaches a Nairobi evening, so there is a daily window, unlike our Pacific pages. What we offer past that is checkability: we have said which six documents hold a tax rate, which side of the ledger each is on, and exactly where the tax on a supplier bill goes when it is approved, rather than describing our procurement module and hoping you do not ask. Put the same question to every vendor on your list and see who can answer it precisely.

Bring your last return

If the bottom line was a claim, we will show you exactly which parts of assembling it our system would carry and which parts it would not. That is a more useful twenty minutes than a demonstration of invoicing.

Talk to us about Trinidad and Tobago See plans & pricing