The Kenya Revenue Authority(KRA) has upgraded its bulk invoice system for high-traffic businesses such as supermarkets and petrol stations, allowing for the processing of bigger batches of documentation.
Starting January 1, 2024, businesses will be required to support any purchase, or expense, with an electronic transaction—a requirement that has posed a dilemma for high-traffic businesses amid concerns about potential delays in the processing of the sales documents.
Analysts had warned that the requirement that the electronic tax invoice include some information such as a buyer’s details presented a compliance challenge for high-traffic businesses.
Hakamba Wangwe, the KRA Chief Manager in charge of the electronic Tax Invoice Management System (e-Tims), said higher-end taxpayers generate a lot of invoices from their billing system which could not be done under the existing e-Tims solutions.
“It (upgraded system) can generate many invoices, have them validated, and transmitted to KRA within a short period,” said Ms Wangwe.
Tax invoice generated from e-Tims has to have the PIN of the registered user, the time and date of issuance, the serial number of the invoice, the buyer’s invoice, the total gross and the total tax amounts.
Others include the item code of supplies, a brief description of the goods and services, the quantity of supply, the unit of measure, the tax rate charged, the unique register identifier, the unique invoice identifier, a quick response (QR) code and other requirements as may be specified by the Commissioner.
So far the KRA has on-boarded almost all the registered VAT taxpayers. There are 250,000 registered VAT taxpayers, with 76,960 on-boarded through TIMS, which uses electronic registers.
Another 53,010 have been on-boarded through e-Tims with the administration of President William Ruto leaning on technology to net more taxpayers.
