DAFZA accounting for Dubai Airport Freezone companies

A DAFZ trader of mobile handsets might buy in USD from Asia, fly stock into the zone and sell to distributors in Africa and the Gulf within days. Margins are thin and FX moves can wipe them out, so each invoice needs its original currency, its AED value and the realised gain or loss when cash arrives. HelloBooks does that for every invoice and bill.

A regional office works differently. It may have no sales of its own and instead charge its parent or sister companies for management and support at cost plus a mark-up. Those recharges are related-party transactions, so they must be priced at arm's length and backed by transfer pricing documentation under the FTA's free zone conditions.

The FTA guide builds qualifying income from a few sources: transactions with other free zone persons that are the beneficial recipients, transactions in qualifying activities, and income from qualifying intellectual property, all excluding revenue from excluded activities. Headquarter services to related parties and distribution of goods in or from a designated zone are among the listed qualifying activities, each with conditions in Ministerial Decision No. 265 of 2023.

Take a DAFZ electronics trader with AED 25 million of revenue, including AED 900,000 of sales to individual customers who collect from the office. Those individual sales are normally an excluded activity. The de minimis cap is AED 1.25 million (5% of revenue, which is lower than AED 5 million). The company is inside the cap, but only by AED 350,000, so the finance team needs to watch it every month.

• Sales to other free zone persons: check the beneficial recipient
• Re-exports and distribution: check the designated zone conditions
• Sales to individuals: normally excluded, counted as non-qualifying

The AI agent tags every sales line by customer type and destination under rules your tax agent signs off. Ask "what share of revenue this year came from individuals?" and it gives the figure and the invoices. A new type of customer is flagged rather than tagged by guesswork.

Statements from your UAE bank are uploaded as PDF, CSV or Excel and matched automatically; there is no live bank feed. On the Business plan you get an audit log and role-based access, which helps when the auditor arrives for the audited financial statements every qualifying free zone person must prepare. For custom income categories or recharge invoice templates, book a call at /book-a-demo or email hello@hellobooks.ai.