Sector
Tax and accounting for UAE technology companies.
Deferred revenue on subscriptions, place of supply for digital services, and reverse charge across an almost entirely overseas cost base.
Common tax challenges
Software businesses invert the usual pattern: cash arrives before the service is delivered, and most of the cost base is billed from overseas.
- Deferred revenue. An annual subscription collected upfront is not twelve months of revenue on day one. It is cash today and a liability that unwinds monthly. Recognising it immediately overstates profit, and therefore taxable income, in the wrong period.
- Place of supply for digital services. Where your customer is determines the VAT treatment. A SaaS business selling across borders needs customer location captured at the point of sale, not reconstructed later.
- Reverse charge on the entire stack. Cloud hosting, developer tooling, analytics, payment processing and advertising are almost all billed from outside the UAE. For a technology business this is not a footnote; it is most of your cost base and it belongs on both sides of the VAT return.
- Capitalising development. Whether development spend is expensed or capitalised changes both reported profit and the tax computation, and the treatment has to be applied consistently and justified.
- Founder and related party costs. Early-stage companies routinely run founder expenses through the entity. Those are Corporate Tax add-backs unless properly structured.
- Free zone licences. Many tech companies hold free zone licences and assume that settles the tax question. It does not.
What we provide
- Deferred revenue schedules and subscription recognition
- Place of supply mapping by customer location
- Reverse charge handling across the full software and infrastructure stack
- Development cost policy, applied consistently
- Investor-ready management reporting and runway analysis
- VAT returns, Corporate Tax filing and free zone position review
Typical documents
- Subscription and billing platform exports
- Cloud, tooling and software invoices
- Payment processor statements
- Employment and contractor agreements
- Investment documents and cap table
- Bank statements in every currency
Our process
We build the deferred revenue schedule first, because until it exists neither profit nor runway is real. See CFO and advisory support and Corporate Tax filing.
Getting started
Tell us your licence type and what is outstanding, and we will confirm which returns apply and what the deadlines are before any work begins. Send us your details, or check your position with the tax status tool.