Registration is mandatory once taxable supplies exceed AED 375,000 across any rolling twelve-month period — not a calendar year, which is what trips people up. Voluntary registration is available from AED 187,500, and can be worth it if your customers are VAT-registered businesses and you carry recoverable input tax.
Once registered, returns are usually quarterly and due within 28 days of the period end. Late filing and late payment both carry administrative penalties, and they accumulate. The FTA does not send reminders in the way people expect.
The genuinely difficult part is not the filing itself — it is treatment. Zero-rated exports, exempt supplies, reverse charge on imported services, and mixed-use input tax all have specific rules, and a wrong treatment repeated every quarter becomes an expensive correction. That is what a proper bookkeeping routine prevents.
Pricing for all of this sits with our fixed monthly accounting packages — one price by transaction volume, nothing billed by the hour.