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For the UAE
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.
The fact the feature list skips
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
Mainland
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.
What we keep seeing on this lane
None of these are software failures. They are structural facts about trading through the UAE that most systems have no field for.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The operations layer
Each links to a fuller tour. Everything statutory — VAT filing, corporate tax, WPS, customs declarations — stays with your adviser, your payroll provider and your clearing agent. The boundary is drawn in full below.
Every location a distinct stock position with governed transfers between them, in-transit visibility, cycle counts and valued variance — so a customs boundary is a boundary in the system too.
Freight, insurance, handling, duty and clearing allocated to the receipt they belong to and carried into the unit cost you price against, at the rate actually paid rather than a standing one.
Requisitions, thresholds that refuse rather than warn, RFQ comparison with the award reason recorded, and three-way matching against the delivery before anyone releases money.
A dollar purchase, a euro freight invoice and a shilling receivable each stay in their own currency at their own rate, so a bad month is distinguishable from a bad cross.
Bill of lading, packing list, certificate of origin, customs paperwork, delivery note and invoice attached to the record they belong to, checksummed and access-logged.
Receiving, counting and dispatch that keep working inside a warehouse or a container yard with no signal, syncing once when it returns without creating a second record.
Scope, stated plainly
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.
Running in the product today
Not built — and honest about what that costs you
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Questions we are asked here
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.