For the UAE

The Dubai entity and the African operation, on one system

There are more capable ERP implementers within a taxi ride of Sheikh Zayed Road than in the rest of this directory combined, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are worth your time for one specific shape: a UAE trading or re-export entity that feeds operating companies in Africa, where the expensive problem is that nobody can see both ends of the lane at once.

Currency: Dirham as a base preset, pegged — so the exposure sits on what you buy in, not what you sell in.
Tax: 5% VAT preset with net, tax and gross split at capture. No FTA integration, no corporate tax computation.
Support: Nairobi, in English, one hour behind Dubai — your working day is covered end to end.

Start with the customs boundary Talk to us about the UAE

The fact the feature list skips

One SKU, two landed costs, and a boundary your stock system probably ignores

Goods sitting in a free zone are outside the UAE customs territory. Duty is suspended, not waived. The moment the same carton crosses into the mainland it becomes payable; if it leaves on a re-export it never does. That is not an accounting nicety — it means the true unit cost of an identical SKU depends on where it ends up, and a system that carries one cost per item cannot tell you which margin you actually made.

Free zone

Duty suspended

Stock held outside the customs territory — Jebel Ali, DMCC, KEZAD, an airport free zone.
Import duty is suspended while the goods stay inside. Freight, insurance and handling are still real cost and still belong on the unit.
A re-export closes the consignment without duty ever becoming payable. That is the whole commercial point of the location.
The entity holding it is usually a separate legal person with its own trade licence and its own books.

Mainland

Duty paid

Stock inside the customs territory, sold domestically through a mainland licence.
Duty at the GCC common external tariff becomes payable on entry and belongs on the unit cost from that moment.
The move from the free zone is a customs event with paperwork, not an internal transfer between two of your shelves.
Domestic sales carry VAT; the free zone entity's treatment may differ. Your tax adviser owns that answer, not us.

What we do about it is unglamorous and effective: the two sides are separate stock locations, the move between them is a governed transfer with its documents attached, and duty and clearing land on the receiving side as landed cost rather than as a general expense. You end up able to answer "what did this actually cost us, on this route" — which is the question the whole structure exists to make complicated.

Five questions worth putting to every vendor on your list — including us

If a carton moves from our free zone location to our mainland location, does the system treat that as a costed event or a silent transfer?
Can we see the same SKU at two different unit costs, and say why, without exporting to a spreadsheet?
Where does duty land — on the unit, or in a monthly expense line nobody can allocate afterwards?
When a re-export cancels a duty liability we had provisioned for, what record shows that it was cancelled?
Who in our business currently knows the answer to the four questions above, and what happens when they are on leave?

What we keep seeing on this lane

Four costs that only appear afterwards

None of these are software failures. They are structural facts about trading through the UAE that most systems have no field for.

A margin that depends on a route nobody recorded

The same pallet re-exported and the same pallet cleared into the mainland do not cost the same. If the system holds one unit cost, one of those two numbers is wrong and you will not find out which until the year-end.

Currency risk on the wrong side of the trade

The dirham is pegged to the dollar, so the leg that moves is the one nobody watches — the yuan, euro and rupee you buy in, and the African currency your customer eventually pays in. The exposure is real, it is just not where the habits point.

Two entities, two ledgers, one WhatsApp group

A free zone company and a mainland company are separate legal persons with separate books. The operational reality is one business, and the gap between the two is bridged by a person rather than by a record.

The container disappears at the port

It leaves Jebel Ali fully documented and reappears three weeks later as a stock figure someone typed in. Everything expensive — demurrage, clearing, short-landing, damage — happens inside that gap.

The awkward question first

Why a Nairobi vendor is in this conversation at all

A fair question, and we would rather answer it than have you ask it silently. A Dubai buyer has no shortage of local options and most of them will serve a purely domestic operation better than we will. The case for us is geographic in the other direction.

The Dubai end

Procurement, consolidation, free zone stock, re-export documentation and payment out to suppliers in Asia and Europe. Well understood, well served, and the part every local vendor can do.

The African end

Landing the container in Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Durban or Walvis Bay, clearing it, costing it at the rate actually paid, moving it through branches and vans, and collecting on it through rails that are not bank transfers. This is the part that goes wrong, and it is the part we have spent years on.

Most systems sold in Dubai treat the African leg as an export document and a customer balance. Most systems sold in Africa cannot see the Dubai entity at all. Groups therefore run two systems and reconcile them by email, which works until somebody asks what the group actually earned on a consignment. We are proposing to be one system across both ends — with the honest caveat that our depth is heavier on the African side, because that is where we come from.

If your operation is entirely inside the UAE and has no African leg, we will say on the first call that a local implementer is the better purchase. That is not modesty; it is the same test we apply in every market in this directory.

Operations in the UAE

One operation, two legal persons, and a pallet that costs differently depending on which one ends up holding it.

The honest position on this market is above and it does not change: local implementers are better placed than we are for a business that lives entirely inside the UAE. What follows is the part they are not set up for — an operation whose free zone and mainland sides are separate entities on paper and one business in practice, with a trade lane running south. Every item here is about that, and none of it is about a rate.

Inventory

Free zone and mainland stock in one position

Two entities, separate books, one physical operation — with governed transfers between them, in-transit visible from both ends, and a stock enquiry that does not require knowing which company you are asking about first.

Landed cost

The route the goods took, carried in what they cost

Re-exported and cleared into the mainland are two different journeys with two different costs. Costs attach to the consignment as their invoices arrive — weeks after the goods — so the unit cost reflects what that pallet actually did rather than an average of both routes.

Stock transfers

A movement between your own entities is still a movement

Confirmed on arrival rather than assumed on despatch, with the in-transit leg held as a state. Between two entities this matters more than usual: the gap is where a transfer becomes a WhatsApp message and a count that disagrees.

Multi-currency

The exposure is on the legs nobody watches

The dirham is pegged, so the currencies that move are the ones you buy in and the one your customer eventually pays in. Both amounts and the rate actually applied stay on the transaction, and no report silently converts two currencies and adds them together.

Offline operations

Capture at the far end of the lane, not just at Jebel Ali

A container leaves fully documented and reappears three weeks later as a figure somebody typed. Transfers, check-in and check-out and asset movements recorded on mobile without a signal at the receiving end, synced on return.

Documents

The paperwork held against the transaction it justifies

Customs entries and delivery notes retrievable by the consignment rather than by whoever filed them, with expiry dates on trade licences and registrations watched rather than remembered.

One boundary belongs with the second card rather than in a footnote: we record what a consignment cost, we do not decide what it should have cost. No customs connection, no duty derived, and no view on which route you should be using — that is your forwarder's and your adviser's territory and we are not going to pretend it is a setting.

Scope, stated plainly

FTA e-invoicing, Arabic, corporate tax, WPS

Four of the six items in the right-hand column are things a UAE vendor would ship as standard. We would rather you weighed that here than discovered it in month three.

Scope in the UAE, stated before the demo

Running in the product today

The dirham and a 5% VAT preset ship built in, with net, tax and gross separated line by line on purchases as well as sales, at the point of capture.
Stock across as many locations as you have, with governed transfers, in-transit visibility, batch and expiry tracking, blind counts and valued variance.
Landed cost on the consignment — freight, duty, clearing and handling folded into true unit cost rather than absorbed into overhead.
Procurement that refuses above a threshold, with RFQ comparison, three-way matching and supplier documents whose expiry dates the system watches.
Multi-currency at the rate actually applied, held on the transaction, which is what makes margin on a Dubai-to-Africa consignment measurable at all.
The African leg in real depth — clearing, branch and van stock, mobile money collection, offline capture, donor and project attribution.

On the roadmap — and commissionable now

An FTA e-invoicing integration. Structuring, submitting, clearing and retrieving against the Federal Tax Authority or an accredited service provider are all part of it. Our only fiscal e-invoicing integration anywhere is Kenya's eTIMS and it does not travel.
An Arabic interface and a right-to-left layout. English only, documents included. In Dubai this bites less than it does in Cairo, because the commercial floor already runs in English — but test it with your own staff, not with your finance director.
A WPS salary file. Our maintained statutory payroll engine covers Kenya only. UAE wage protection files, gratuity accrual and Emiratisation reporting are not produced.
Intercompany eliminations or consolidated statutory accounts. A group view across entities is a reporting layer here, not a statutory consolidation, and we would rather you heard that now.

Where we point you to a specialist — and the customs line is the one to hold us to

UAE corporate tax computation and statutory accounts sit outside this product. We do not calculate the 9% charge, apply free zone qualifying-income tests, or produce anything filed. That is your tax adviser's work and we will not blur it.
Customs system integration sits outside this product. We connect to Dubai Trade, Mirsal and the port community systems not at all. Customs paperwork is attached as evidence, not exchanged as data.

Every item in the middle column is buildable. Handing a document to your accredited service provider and landing their inbound documents against the order and receipt they belong to, an Arabic interface, a WPS file and intercompany eliminations are all scoped builds. Kenya's eTIMS and maintained payroll engine exist because clients commissioned them. Ask and we will return a specification, a timeline and a price — and note that becoming the accredited provider itself is a separate appointment we are not bidding for.

Read the right-hand column as a purchase decision, not a disclaimer. If FTA e-invoicing or a WPS file is a hard requirement for day one, buy from a UAE vendor — we will tell you that on the call, and we will mean it. If your compliance layer is already settled with an adviser or a local package and the thing actually costing you money is stock, cost and visibility across two ends of a trade lane, then the left-hand column is the conversation.

How this starts

Three moves, in this order

Step 01

Settle the fiscal layer somewhere else first

Confirm your VAT position, your corporate tax position and your e-invoicing phase with the FTA or your adviser, and decide who provides it. Every architectural decision below is downstream of that answer and none of them should be made by a software vendor.

Step 02

Cost one real consignment, both ways

Take a container that arrived at Jebel Ali. Cost it as a re-export and cost it as a mainland clearance, in the system, on your numbers. If we cannot show you two defensible unit costs and the reason they differ, stop there.

Step 03

Then connect the far end

Bring one African operating company on — its clearing, its branches, its collections — and run a month where the group can see both ends of the same consignment. That is the thing you are actually buying.

Read before you shortlist

Guides for this market

Implementation & Rollout

ERP Software in the UAE: A Practical Buyer's Guide (2026)

The UAE has more competent implementers per square kilometre than anywhere else in this corpus, so the interesting question is not who can do it. It is which of three quite different products you are actually shopping for — and where an international vendor should honestly lose.

Sep 16, 2025 · 13 min Read

Inventory Insights

Free Zone or Mainland: One SKU, Two Landed Costs

Duty is suspended in a free zone, not waived. The same carton therefore has two true unit costs depending on where it ends up, and most stock systems can only hold one of them. The arithmetic, the failure mode, and how to structure it.

Sep 18, 2025 · 12 min Read

Logistics & Field Service

The Dubai–Africa Trade Lane: Two Systems, One Consignment

A Dubai entity buys and consolidates; an African operating company clears, distributes and collects. Almost every group runs these on separate systems and reconciles by email — which works right up until somebody asks what the group actually earned on a container.

Sep 18, 2025 · 12 min Read

Point of Sale

Three Tenders, and the One That Was Never Real

This till takes cash, one mobile-money rail and a card. It briefly took a fourth on refunds — store credit — which reversed the sale, returned the stock, and recorded the debt to the customer nowhere at all.

Jun 23, 2026 · 11 min Read

Reports & BI

One Place That Knows What Time It Is

A report schedule in this product carries its own timezone and computes its next run in it. The deadline engine three modules away has no timezone at all. The capability exists, once, in the place where getting it wrong matters least.

Jun 20, 2026 · 11 min Read

Projects & Job Costing

What a Project Clone Carries, and What It Resets by Design

Copying a project rebuilds the whole structure — tasks, subtasks, dependencies, milestones, checklists — and deliberately resets every date, assignment and trace of progress. The list of what it resets is the most opinionated thing in the module, and we can tune it to your templates.

Jun 17, 2026 · 11 min Read

Questions we are asked here

Straight answers, and which half of each one is a build

Do you integrate with FTA e-invoicing?

No. There is no connection to the Federal Tax Authority or to any accredited service provider under the Ministry of Finance's phased e-invoicing programme — nothing is structured to a prescribed format, submitted, cleared, registered or retrieved. Our only fiscal e-invoicing integration anywhere is Kenya's eTIMS and it is not portable. The programme is being introduced in phases, so confirm the scope and timing of your own obligation with the FTA, the Ministry of Finance or your tax adviser rather than with any vendor. Where an obligation applies to you, a compliant provider handles document issuance and AWRA runs the operations layer alongside it — and we would insist that whatever identifier the submission returns is stored back on our transaction record, because that is what makes a daily report of unregistered sales possible. That is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now. Handing a document over in the shape an accredited service provider expects, and landing their inbound documents against the purchase order and goods receipt they belong to, is defined engineering. Kenya's eTIMS transmission and its maintained statutory payroll engine both exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them — neither arrived on a roadmap by itself. If this is the thing standing between you and a decision, say so and we will come back with a written specification, a timeline and a price before you commit to anything. What we will not do is print a date nobody has paid for. What we would not do is become the accredited provider itself — that is a separate appointment and not one we are bidding for.

Can you run a free zone entity and a mainland entity together?

Two honest shapes, and the right one depends on your books. If the entities file separately and you want clean legal separation, run them as two organizations — each with its own base currency, users, approvals and records, and no automatic group view between them. If what you need is one operational picture, run one organization with the free zone and the mainland as distinct locations, which gives you governed costed transfers between them and a single stock and cost position across both. What we do not offer in either shape is intercompany elimination or a consolidated statutory account, so if your auditor needs a formal consolidation that stays with them. Settle this in the first call — it is much cheaper to decide before go-live than after.

Does it handle the dirham and 5% VAT?

The dirham ships as a base currency preset and a 5% VAT rate ships as a built-in preset, with net, tax and gross separated on every sales and purchase line at the point of capture. More useful for a trading business is that foreign-currency purchases stay in their own currency at the rate actually applied to that transaction rather than a standing monthly rate. Note that we ship one maintained preset rather than a maintained rate history, and we do not interpret free zone VAT treatment, designated zone rules or reverse-charge positions — presets are defaults you own, and the treatment is a question for the FTA or your adviser.

What about UAE corporate tax?

Not ours, and this is worth being blunt about because it is the newest thing on most UAE finance teams' desks. We do not compute the 9% charge, we do not apply the small business relief threshold, we do not test whether income qualifies under a free zone regime, and we produce no return or statutory financial statements. What we do hold is the operational and cost record that a corporate tax computation is built from — costed transactions, allocated overhead, project and entity attribution, and documents attached to the transactions they support. Your adviser does the computation; we make their inputs retrievable instead of reconstructed.

Do you produce a WPS salary file?

No. Our maintained statutory payroll engine covers Kenya only, so no wage protection file is generated for MoHRE or for a free zone authority's equivalent, no end-of-service gratuity is accrued to UAE rules, and nothing is submitted or remitted on your behalf. Emiratisation reporting is not produced either. What works anywhere is the employee side — records, contracts, leave with balances, attendance, and payroll cost allocated to projects, cost centres and entities. Most UAE clients keep a local payroll provider or an exchange-house arrangement for the WPS layer and hold the employee and cost side here, which is a genuinely stable split. That is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now. A wage file in the layout the system expects, generated from live employee records, is the same shape of build as the Kenyan engine. Kenya's eTIMS transmission and its maintained statutory payroll engine both exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them — neither arrived on a roadmap by itself. The advice we would give before you ask: a local bureau already filing every month is cheaper than commissioning us and correct by default. We will take the build if you want it; we would rather you did not need it.

Is the interface available in Arabic?

No — English only, no right-to-left layout, and documents produced in English. We want to be accurate rather than reassuring about what that means here. In Egypt or Morocco this is frequently disqualifying. In the UAE the commercial and warehouse floor overwhelmingly already operates in English as a working language, so it is usually a non-issue in practice — but "usually" is not "always", it may not hold for a customer-facing document you are expected to issue in Arabic, and it is not our call to make on your behalf. Test it with the people who will key transactions. That is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now. Arabic means mirrored layout, numeral formatting and column order rather than a string file, so we would price it as engineering and show you a customer-facing document before you committed. Ask and we will scope it.

Where does support come from, and does the time difference work?

Nairobi, with remote onboarding and live training in English. Dubai is one hour ahead of us, so your working day and ours overlap almost completely — you are not filing tickets into a timezone that has gone home. The weekend is the wrinkle worth raising: it is not uniform across the emirates or between the public and private sector, so non-working days and public holidays are configured per organization, and leave arithmetic, workflow due dates and escalation, and helpdesk response clocks all read that setting. Set it once at configuration and an approval deadline will not land on your weekend.

Bring one container and both ends of the lane

Cost a real consignment as a re-export and as a mainland clearance, then follow it to the African operating company that receives it. If seeing both ends on one screen does not change anything for you, we are the wrong vendor and the call will have been short.

Talk to us about the UAE See plans & pricing