Dubai South free zone accounting for logistics and aviation businesses

A freight forwarder in Dubai South earns from air freight, customs clearance, warehousing and last-mile delivery, often for the same shipper. Costs come from airlines, truckers and handling agents. Profit per shipment is the number that matters, and it is hard to see when revenue and costs sit in single accounts.

HelloBooks tags revenue and costs by customer and by service. The AI agent reads airline and trucking invoices, matches them to the shipment or job reference you use, and posts them to the right cost line. Ask "which customers lost us money on air freight last quarter?" and it shows the answer with the invoices behind it.

The FTA guide counts logistics services among qualifying activities, subject to the conditions in Ministerial Decision No. 265 of 2023. Income from transactions with other free zone persons can also be qualifying. Transactions with natural persons are normally excluded, which matters for any firm doing home deliveries.

Say a fulfilment operator earns AED 9 million: AED 7.8 million from business shippers and AED 1.2 million from fees charged directly to individual consumers. The de minimis cap is the lower of AED 5 million or 5% of revenue, so here it is AED 450,000. If the consumer fees are non-qualifying, the company fails the test and loses qualifying status for that year and the four after. Restructuring so that the shipper, not the consumer, is billed is a commercial and tax decision for the business and its adviser.

• Customer type on every invoice: business, free zone, individual, overseas
• Income-category totals updated as invoices post
• Flags when a new customer type appears

Most Dubai South businesses pay suppliers in AED and USD and bill in both. Multi-currency invoices hold AED values and record FX differences. Bank statements from any UAE bank are uploaded as PDF, CSV or Excel and matched by the AI; there is no live bank feed. Approval rules hold large carrier bills for the operations manager before they are paid.

For a fixed chart of accounts per service line, job-number tagging or a custom shipment report, book a call at /book-a-demo or email hello@hellobooks.ai.