Accounting Services in Dubai

The six practices

Corporate tax

Registration through EmaraTax, return filing, Small Business Relief assessment and election, free zone qualifying income reviews, transfer pricing documentation, tax group formation, deregistration on closure, and penalty waiver applications where a deadline has already been missed.

The recurring theme in this practice is that businesses underestimate who is caught. A return is mandatory for every registered taxable person, including those at 0%, those electing Small Business Relief, and free zone companies with QFZP status A dormant company files a nil return. A company making a loss files and preserves that loss for future relief. A free zone company on a 0 per cent rate still files. The return is the obligation; the tax is a separate question.

VAT

Registration and deregistration, quarterly and monthly return filing, input tax recovery reviews, refund claims, voluntary disclosures on Form 211 where an error needs correcting, and representation when the FTA raises a query on a filed position.

Most VAT problems are classification problems that only surface at filing. The distinction that costs the most money is zero-rated versus exempt: both mean no VAT on the invoice, so they look identical in a ledger, but only zero-rated supplies preserve your right to recover input tax. A business treating exempt supplies as zero-rated builds an exposure quietly until somebody reviews it.

E-invoicing readiness

ERP and invoice-data gap assessment, accredited service provider selection, and migration planning against your actual revenue band. The mandate moves invoices to structured XML on the Peppol network, and it applies to all persons conducting business, regardless of vat registration status.

The part businesses underestimate is not the provider contract, which is a procurement exercise. It is invoice data quality — customer master data, tax registration numbers, line-item detail, and the handling of credit notes, milestone billing, retention and advance payments. Those take months to clean, which is why the appointment deadline is not the real deadline.

Accounting and bookkeeping

Monthly bookkeeping, backlog and catch-up work where records have fallen behind, bank and ledger reconciliation, IFRS financial statement preparation, management accounts and MIS reporting, chart of accounts design, and accounting software setup or migration.

Bookkeeping is the foundation everything else stands on. A tax computation is only as defensible as the ledger beneath it, and an auditor can only sign what the records support. Businesses that treat bookkeeping as an administrative afterthought discover the cost of that decision at year end, usually under time pressure.

Audit and assurance

Audit preparation and support, statutory audit liaison, internal audit, forensic and fraud investigation, financial due diligence, business valuation, and stock and fixed asset verification.

Most free zones require audited financial statements and the deadlines differ by zone. Audited accounts are also increasingly the evidence base behind a corporate tax position, which means the audit and the tax return can no longer be prepared in isolation from one another.

CFO and advisory

Outsourced CFO, budgeting and forecasting, cash flow management, financial modelling, feasibility studies, business restructuring, management reporting packs and KPI design.

This is for businesses that need the judgement without the full-time salary — usually somewhere between AED 5 million and AED 50 million of revenue, where the numbers matter enough to need interpretation but not enough to justify a permanent hire.

Where we work

Both emirates, mainland and free zone. Free zone requirements differ materially by zone, so we file to the one your licence actually sits under:

Industries

Compliance work that is not tax

These filings carry their own penalties and are frequently the ones no supplier owns, because they fall between the accountant and the corporate service provider:

• ESR — Economic Substance Regulations — notification and, where a relevant activity is carried on, an annual report. Determining whether you carry on a relevant activity is the substantive question; the filing is the easy part.
• UBO — Ultimate Beneficial Owner register must be maintained and filed with the licensing authority, and kept current as ownership changes.
• AML and goAML — Designated non-financial businesses and professions must register on the goAML portal and meet AML/CFT obligations. If you are a DNFBP you need a registered compliance officer, a documented risk assessment, KYC procedures and staff training, not just a portal registration.
• Payroll and WPS — salaries processed through the Wage Protection System on time, with end-of-service calculations kept current rather than estimated at exit.
• Liquidation and deregistration — closing an entity properly, including the liquidator report and the tax deregistrations that have their own deadlines and their own penalties for missing them.

What a monthly cycle looks like

Recurring compliance should be unremarkable. The measure of whether it is working is how little of your attention it takes:

• Week one — the previous month closed: bank and ledger reconciled, supplier and customer balances agreed, anything unexplained queried while it is still recent.
• Week two — management accounts issued with a short commentary. What moved, why, and anything needing a decision.
• Quarterly — VAT prepared and filed ahead of the date, with the supporting schedules kept as they are built.
• Annually — financial statements, audit where required, corporate tax computation and return, and the other filings mapped against the same calendar.

How to choose an accounting firm in Dubai

Since you are comparing, here is what we would actually check — including where the answer might point you somewhere other than us:

• Are they a registered tax agent? Advising on tax and being able to represent you before the FTA are different things. Ask which one they are.
• Do they hold an audit licence? If not, your year end involves a handover, and handovers are where deadlines slip.
• Do they tell you dates before you ask? A firm that only responds is a firm whose penalties you will pay.
• Is their published guidance current? Check whether their e-invoicing page distinguishes the revenue bands and whether their penalty guidance reflects the April 2026 change. Both are quick tells.
• Do they specialise in your sector? A construction revenue recognition problem and an e-commerce marketplace VAT problem need different people.
• Will they say what they do not know? In a regime this young, certainty on every point is a warning sign rather than a reassurance.

Software we work in

We do not sell software and we have no reseller arrangement with any vendor, which means we have no reason to move you off something that works. We work in whatever you already use:

• Zoho Books — the most common choice among SMEs in this market, and reasonable for most of them.
• QuickBooks Online and Xero — strong where the business is service-based and the reporting matters more than the inventory.
• Tally — still widespread in trading businesses, and workable, though the e-invoicing transition needs planning earlier here than elsewhere.
• Sage, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP Business One — where scale or manufacturing complexity justifies them.

The question we get asked is which is best. The honest answer is that the software is rarely the constraint. A business that has outgrown its system usually knows; a business that thinks new software will fix a process problem usually ends up with the same problem in a more expensive place. Where a migration genuinely is needed — most often because the current system cannot produce structured output for e-invoicing — we say so and plan it against your go-live date rather than in a rush.

Switching from your current accountant

Most of our engagements start as a handover, so the process is routine rather than delicate:

1. We review what exists. Filed returns, registrations, the current ledger and the last set of financial statements. This tells us what we are inheriting before we agree to inherit it.
2. We tell you what we found. Including anything outstanding, anything filed that we would have filed differently, and anything that needs correcting. You get this in writing whether or not you proceed.
3. We agree a cut-over date, usually a period end so nothing is split mid-cycle.
4. We collect the records and reconcile the opening position rather than assuming it.
5. The recurring cycle starts, with the compliance calendar set up in the first month.

You do not need to have fallen out with your current adviser for this to be worth doing, and we will tell you if what you have is working. A review that concludes you are in good hands is still a useful review.

How we price

Recurring compliance is quoted as a fixed monthly or annual fee wherever the work is predictable, which most of it is once we have seen the transaction volume. Project work — a backlog clean-up, an e-invoicing readiness assessment, a valuation — is quoted as a fixed scope. We do not publish a headline price because the honest answer depends on volume, entity count and the state of the records, and a number that changes after we look at the ledger is worse than no number at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last reviewed 27 July 2026. Rates, thresholds and deadlines change — the e-invoicing provider deadline has already moved once. Confirm current requirements with the Federal Tax Authority before acting, or ask us to check your position.