Know What Your UAE Accounting & Tax Support Could Cost
Answer a few simple questions and get a clear, tailored service estimate — no obligation and no hidden complexity.
- Takes around 60 seconds
- Tailored to your business
- No contact details required to see your estimate
No payment. No obligation.
Your business
A mainland & free-zone group carries two sets of books and two filing calendars, so it is priced higher than either on its own.
This only affects the one-time onboarding figure — catching up old records is separate work from running them forward.
Your numbers
Estimated taxable profit: AED 300,000. Not sure? Most UAE SMEs land between 8% and 20%.
Every sales invoice, purchase bill, bank line and expense claim counts as one.
What you need handled
Roughly AED 34,500 a year across the services you selected.
Want this in writing?
We’ll send this estimate to your inbox and follow up with a firm, fixed quote after a free 30-minute review. No obligation.
Indicative estimate only — not tax advice, and not a binding quote. Tax figures use the 2026 UAE Corporate Tax and VAT thresholds. Your actual position depends on your financial year, elections made and the FTA’s assessment.
Outsourcing versus hiring your own accountant
The salary is never the whole number. Once you add the visa, gratuity, insurance, software and the specialist you still have to call at filing season, the arithmetic usually goes one way.
Your own accountant
- Sits in your office full-time
- Visa, gratuity, insurance and leave on top
- One person’s knowledge, one person’s blind spots
- Software licences billed separately
- Filing season still needs a tax specialist
- Annual leave means nobody is watching the books
Ripple
- A qualified team, not a single hire
- No visa, gratuity, insurance or leave cover
- VAT and Corporate Tax specialists already on the file
- Accounting software included in the fee
- Deadlines tracked and filed for you
- Scales up or down as the business moves
Based on a fully-loaded in-house cost of salary plus visa, gratuity, insurance and software, compared with the midpoint of your estimate above.
The fees are the small number. The fines are not.
These are the FTA’s published administrative penalties. Every one of them is avoidable with a calendar and someone watching it.
Late Corporate Tax registration
A single flat penalty for missing your registration deadline — charged before you have filed anything or earned a dirham of taxable profit.
Late Corporate Tax return
For the first twelve months, then AED 1,000 a month after that. A one-day delay is charged as a full month.
Late VAT return
Rising to AED 2,000 if it happens again within 24 months — and it is charged per return, so two missed quarters means two penalties.
Unpaid tax
Interest runs on any tax not settled by the due date, from the day after the deadline until it is paid in full.
Records not kept properly
For a first failure to keep the records the tax law requires, rising on repeat. Incomplete books are a penalty in their own right.
An error in a filed return
Charged where a submitted return contains a mistake — though nothing is due if you correct it before the filing deadline passes.
Penalty figures are the FTA’s published administrative penalties as at August 2026. They are summarised here for orientation, not as a complete schedule — the full list runs considerably longer.
No black box. Here is exactly what moves the number.
A calculator that will not show its working is a lead form wearing a costume. These are the drivers behind your estimate, and the limits of what it can tell you.
What the fee is built from
- Transaction volume sets the bookkeeping base — it is the closest proxy there is for hours of work.
- Your industry adjusts it. Inventory, WIP, retentions, multi-currency and POS data all add reconciliation work.
- Entity count multiplies almost everything — separate ledgers, separate filings, and consolidation on top.
- Each service is priced as its own line so you can see what removing one would actually save.
- Revenue drives the audit and advisory lines and the tax panel — not the bookkeeping fee.
What it cannot tell you
- Whether you qualify as a Qualifying Free Zone Person — that turns on your activities and substance, not a dropdown.
- Your exact filing deadlines, which follow your financial year end and licence issue date.
- Adjustments that change taxable profit — disallowed expenses, related-party pricing, loss relief and the rest.
- What is already sitting in your books. Reviewing them is the first thing we do, and it is free.
- The final fee. This gives you a defensible range — the fixed number comes after the review.
Before you take the number too literally
It is a range, deliberately. On a straightforward set of books it usually lands close. Where it drifts is with messy historical records, unusual group structures or heavy transfer-pricing work — all of which we can only price once we have looked. Treat it as a realistic budget, not a quote.
Because two businesses with identical revenue can be four times apart in work. A consultancy with 30 invoices a month and a contractor with retentions, WIP and 40 suppliers are not the same job. We give a fixed monthly fee after a free review, and then it stays fixed.
No. It applies the statutory rate to the profit you entered: 0% up to AED 375,000 and 9% above it. Your real taxable income is accounting profit after adjustments — disallowed expenses, exempt income, carried-forward losses and any reliefs you elect. The number here is for orientation.
If your revenue is AED 3 million or less, you may elect to be treated as having no taxable income for that period — available for tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2026. It is not automatic: you have to elect it in your return, and you still have to register and file.
Registration is mandatory once taxable turnover passes AED 375,000 in the last 12 months, or if you expect to pass it in the next 30 days. Voluntary registration is available from AED 187,500. Turnover, not profit, is what counts.
Mainland LLCs are generally required to have audited financial statements, and most free zones — DMCC, JAFZA, DAFZA among them — require them at licence renewal. Even where it is not mandatory, banks and investors usually ask. We will tell you plainly which applies to you.
Common, and fixable. That is what the one-time onboarding figure covers — reconstructing the records, reconciling the bank, and getting you to a clean opening balance. It is separate from the monthly fee, and we quote it once we know how far back it goes.
Nothing is stored or sent while you use the tool — the whole calculation runs in your browser. Your figures only reach us if you choose to have the estimate emailed, and then only so we can prepare a proper quote.
Turn the estimate into a fixed number.
Thirty minutes, a look at your books, and you leave with a firm monthly fee, your real filing deadlines and an honest view of anything outstanding.
- A fixed monthly fee that stays fixed
- Your actual Corporate Tax and VAT deadlines
- No-obligation first conversation