Dubai Media City company accounting for agencies and broadcasters

A DMC creative agency runs a launch campaign for a car dealer: AED 180,000 of fees, AED 420,000 of media bought on the client's behalf, and AED 65,000 of production. If media spend and fees sit in one revenue line, the agency looks four times bigger than it is and margin reports mean nothing.

HelloBooks tags each invoice line and each supplier bill to the campaign. Media pass-through goes to its own accounts, so the agency can see gross billings and true fee income side by side. The AI agent reads media owner and production house invoices, matches them to the campaign code and holds anything over the approval limit for the account director.

• Campaign or project tags on every sale and cost
• Separate accounts for media pass-through and agency fees
• Approval rules on large media and production bills

Media services are not on the FTA's list of qualifying activities as such. For a DMC agency, qualifying income is mainly likely to come from clients that are free zone persons and the beneficial recipients of the work. Campaigns for mainland brands and overseas clients would then be non-qualifying revenue, and work paid for by individuals is normally an excluded activity.

Here is the arithmetic for one agency. Revenue of AED 5.5 million, of which AED 4.9 million comes from free zone clients and AED 600,000 from a mainland retailer. The de minimis cap is AED 275,000, which is 5% of revenue. Non-qualifying revenue of AED 600,000 is over the cap, so the agency would not be a qualifying free zone person that year. The FTA guide says the loss lasts for that period and the next four.

Broadcasters sell airtime, sponsorships and content licences, often to agencies rather than brands. Each contract can be tagged by counterparty type when the invoice is raised, so the free zone split is built as you go rather than reconstructed at year end. Ask the agent "how much did we bill mainland clients this quarter?" and you get the figure with its invoices.

If your agency wants campaign reports in a particular format, a media chart of accounts or approval rules by client, book a call at /book-a-demo or email hello@hellobooks.ai.