Accounting Pro GCC VAT Returns for Odoo 19 Community documentation

Who it is for: accountants and VAT managers of companies in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and the tax agents and auditors who work with them.

The examples: the pictures show a demo company, Atlas Trading LLC (UAE), in AED, with the TRN 100512398700003 and quarterly returns. It uses a generic chart of accounts with its own UAE taxes: Odoo’s UAE localization is not installed. The company has 153 invoices, bills and credit notes from January to October 2026, issued for three emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah). The returns VAT 201 Q1 2026 and Q2 2026 are filed, Q3 2026 is reviewed and not filed. Today in the demo is 28 October 2026 and Amira Saleh (administrator) is the person you see. The figures in the text are the figures in the pictures.

What your company needs to use it:

1. Unzip the package. Inside is taqnix_accounting_pro_gcc_vat.zip; unzip it to get the folder taqnix_accounting_pro_gcc_vat.
2. Copy the folder into one of the addons_path folders of your Odoo server and restart Odoo.
3. Log in as an administrator, activate Developer mode, open Apps and press Update Apps List.
4. Remove the “Apps” filter, search GCC VAT and press Install.

# or from the command line
./odoo-bin -c odoo.conf -d YOUR_DATABASE -i taqnix_accounting_pro_gcc_vat --stop-after-init

Then, in this order:

1. Open Accounting → Configuration → Settings, block GCC VAT Returns: check the form, the filing frequency, the quarters and the default emirate (chapter Settings).
2. Press Map the taxes and apply the codes that are right (chapter Map your taxes).
3. Check the emirate of your sales documents (chapter Emirates and customs permits).
4. Create the first return in Accounting → Accounting → VAT → VAT Returns and press Compute.

Open it with Accounting → Configuration → Accounting → VAT Tax Mapping or with the link Map the taxes in the settings. It is for VAT managers.

Where the proposals come from, in this order:

1. The tax grids of Odoo’s UAE and Saudi localizations (1(a) to 1(g) with the emirate, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9; the KSA grids), when those localizations are installed.
2. The reverse charge repartition: a tax with +100 % and −100 % tax lines.
3. Names and labels in English and Arabic: excise or withholding means Not VAT; exempt, export, out of scope, tourist, import and citizen are recognised too.
4. The rate: 0 %, 5 % for the UAE, 15 % for Saudi Arabia.

Groups of taxes are never coded: their children are. A code chosen by hand is never changed. Running the wizard twice changes nothing. A tax without a proposal stays empty: code it by hand on the tax form. Check every proposal before you apply it; the wizard reads names and rates, it does not know your transactions.

On the tax form (Accounting → Configuration → Accounting → Taxes), tab Advanced Options, the group VAT return has three fields. VAT return code is the code. Emirate of the supplies appears only for UAE standard-rated and tourist-scheme sales taxes: use it for a tax made for one emirate, such as Odoo’s “5% DU”. Code proposed by the mapping wizard is ticked while the code is the wizard’s and not yours. The list of taxes has an optional column VAT return code.

Zero-rated and exempt purchases are in no UAE box. A tax without a code is in no box: the return warns about it (see Troubleshooting).

The FTA guide asks for the emirate of the establishment most closely connected to the supply. In Odoo you tell it in three ways:

1. On the document. Invoices, bills, credit notes and receipts have the field Emirate (VAT) in the tab Other Info, group Accounting (companies on the UAE form only). It starts from the default emirate of the company. Miscellaneous journal entries do not show the field and take the default emirate.
2. On the tax. A tax with an Emirate of the supplies (such as “5% DU”) wins over the document.
3. Cash basis entries take the emirate of their invoice.

Supplies without an emirate are never dropped. They appear on their own line, Standard-rated supplies without emirate (in no box), and in a warning on the return.

On vendor bills and refunds the field Customs permit number holds the permit of an import. It is written in the purchase listing of the FAF.

Corrections of earlier periods. The 2021 FTA guide lets you correct an error of an earlier period in the current return when its tax effect is not more than AED 10,000; above that it asks for a voluntary disclosure. The module does not check this limit, and it is not verified for 2026. Ask your tax adviser.

Profit Margin Scheme. The yes/no question of the return is a field on the return form. It is a question for you: it is not printed on the worksheet.

Filed returns are green, drafts blue and cancelled returns grey. Filters: To prepare, Filed, Difference with the ledger, UAE VAT 201, KSA VAT return and Period. Group by status or year.

With New, the period proposed is the one after your last return; with no return yet, it is the last complete tax period of your settings. Two returns of the same company and form cannot overlap, a return covers at most one year, and a return cannot be duplicated.

1. Press New, check the company, the form and the tax period, and save.
2. Press Compute. Press Recompute whenever your entries change; the corrections you typed before are kept.
3. Read the warnings on top and the tabs Boxes and Reconciliation. Open the figures with the smart buttons Journal Items and Transactions.
4. Type corrections if you need them (below), then press Mark as reviewed.
5. Print the worksheet, file on the portal, then Mark as filed (next chapter).

The header. Company, Form, Tax period, Previous return (linked automatically) and Profit Margin Scheme used, then VAT due, Recoverable VAT, Net VAT payable and the Difference with the general ledger.

The tab Boxes. One row per box: Box, Description (in your language), Amount correction, Amount, VAT correction, VAT amount, Adjustment and Reason. Boxes you type by hand are blue and totals are bold. More columns (the journal item figures, the English and Arabic labels) can be shown from the column selector.

Other tabs. Reconciliation compares the boxes with the general ledger. Filing and notes shows who computed, reviewed and filed the return and when, and holds your notes. Log is the audit trail.

Warnings on top. The return warns about: a company currency that is not AED (UAE) or SAR (KSA); taxes used in the period that have no VAT code; taxes whose code belongs to the other form; Odoo branches that share the TRN; supplies without an emirate; a difference with the ledger; a missing or badly formed company TRN; KSA box 14 above 5,000; and lines with two taxes for the same box (see Limits).

Buttons. Compute / Recompute, Mark as reviewed, Mark as filed and Reopen (managers), Print worksheet, Excel, Reset to draft and Cancel. Journal Items opens the journal items that make up the figures and Transactions opens the PDF of the VAT Transactions Detail of the period.

1. Submit the return on the portal of the tax authority.
2. On the return, press Mark as filed (VAT managers; the return must be Reviewed).
3. Type the Filing reference you received (at most 64 characters) and the Filing date. The date cannot be in the future and cannot be before the end of the period.
4. Confirm. The return is Filed and a green banner shows the date and the reference.

A filed return cannot change by any route: not its boxes, notes or dates, and not the emirate of the documents of its period. A VAT manager can Reopen it with a reason of at least 5 characters: the return goes back to Computed, the reopening is logged and posted in the chatter. A return that was filed once can never be deleted: keep it cancelled. Attach the portal acknowledgement in the chatter if you wish.

The tab Log lists every event with its date, user, details and reason: Created, Computed (with the net), Adjusted (with the boxes), Reviewed, Filed (with the reference), Reopened (with the reason), Cancelled and Set to draft. Nobody can change or delete a log line.

Open it from Accounting → Reporting → Taxes & Fiscal → VAT Return, or from the report switcher of the Accounting Pro screen (group Taxes). It needs the Accounting Pro reports group. Like the other Accounting Pro reports it has favorites, scheduled reports and a place in the financial package.

The header says that this is a worksheet and not the return itself, and shows the form, the company TRN, the saved return with its state and filing reference, and the entries counted. The columns are Box, Description, Arabic description, Amount, VAT amount and Adjustment, for each period. The form is bilingual: the English and the Arabic label of every box are shown in both interface languages.

Click a figure to open its journal items (when one list of journal items adds up to it). The warnings of the return are shown too. For a saved return the report warns The journal items changed since the return was computed, with the boxes concerned, when your entries changed after the computation. The notes under the table repeat the basis of the figures and say that the module files nothing.

Comparison columns show live figures. In the picture the live Q2 box 14 is 12,451.40, while the filed Q2 return says 11,978.90: the difference is its correction of −472.50.

The VAT accounts are those of the tax repartition lines of the coded taxes. The figures of the boxes are the journal item part only: manual corrections are not part of the reconciliation. When one account holds both output and input VAT, only the net rows R7 to R9 are shown.

What a difference means. A VAT settlement entry dated inside the period (it moves the VAT balances to a VAT payable account), an entry typed straight onto a VAT account, or a tax without a code. The drill-down of R9 lists exactly the journal items concerned. A difference is not always an error, but you must be able to explain it.

Open it from Accounting → Reporting → Taxes & Fiscal → VAT Transactions Detail, or with the button Transactions of a return. Options: the period, posted entries, Journals, Partners, Form, Box (all boxes or one), Only documents without a valid partner TRN and Units.

There is one row per box with its figures. Click it to open its documents: date, number, partner, partner TRN (or “missing”), amount and VAT as counted in the box: sales as collected, purchases as paid, credit notes negative. For the reverse charge boxes the VAT is the part counted in that box. The screen shows 80 rows per page. Click a number to open the document and an amount to open its journal items.

The last section, Business documents without a valid partner TRN, lists the documents of customers and vendors that are companies of the country of the form, from the threshold set in the settings. PDF and Excel list up to 20,000 documents per box and warn when there are more.

The PDF opens with the company, the period, the sentence that this is a worksheet and not the return itself, the form, the TRN, the saved return with its filing reference, the boxes in English and Arabic and the notes. The last page is a Declaration with three signature boxes: Prepared by, Reviewed by and Authorised signatory, date. Print it, sign it and keep it with your file.

Use Print worksheet and Excel on a return, or PDF and Excel on the report. The Excel file keeps the comparison columns and real numbers, not text.

Verified: the box numbers and the English labels follow the ZATCA “Submit VAT Return” portal guide (July 2026).

Monthly filing is mandatory above SAR 40 million of annual revenue, due by the end of the month that follows the period. Otherwise a period is three months. The demo company is in the UAE, so there is no picture of the KSA form.

The layout is the one of the FTA Requirements Document for Tax Accounting Software (2017), which is still the version the FTA site publishes. The sample FAF of the FTA could not be read, so check the file before you send it.

Open Accounting → Accounting → VAT → FTA Audit File (FAF) (VAT managers). The dialog has a note on top and these fields:

Check the data. The dialog lists the checks before you export:

Show opens the records of a check. Download the FAF runs the checks again and downloads FAF_<TRN>_<from>_<to>.csv. Every export is kept in the FAF Export Log: date, user, company, period, the number of purchase, supply and ledger lines, the SHA-256 of the file and a Download button. The log cannot be changed or deleted, and the SHA-256 lets you prove that the file you gave is the one the module wrote.

Tax codes are SR, ZR, EX and RC, as the FTA defines them, and OS for out-of-scope supplies, which is our own code: the FTA defines none, and the FAF dialog says so. Reverse charge purchases show the recoverable VAT. The VAT of a document is shared among its lines in proportion to their amounts, so it always equals the tax journal items.

Cleaning of the texts. Commas become semicolons, double quotes become single quotes, line breaks and direction marks become spaces, and a text that starts with = + - or @ gets a leading apostrophe, so a spreadsheet does not read it as a formula. A description such as “-10% discount” is therefore written “'-10% discount”.

Format. UTF-8 without BOM (the FTA does not specify an encoding; Arabic names need UTF-8) and Windows line ends. A company not in AED is converted at the rate of each transaction date. The general ledger balance runs per account from its balance at the start of the period (profit and loss accounts from the start of the fiscal year). The file is built in memory in one request: for a very large export, choose a shorter period.

A box used by a formula cannot be renamed or archived. Saved returns keep the boxes they were computed with. A module update does not overwrite your edits.

The card shows the net VAT of the latest computed, reviewed or filed return of the company, with the name and state of that return under it, the change against the return before it, and a small trend of up to six returns. With no computed return, it shows the live figure of the current tax period so far. A click opens the VAT Return report. A company with no VAT return form has no card.

Open Accounting → Configuration → Settings, block GCC VAT Returns, after the block Accounting Pro.

A person who has only the Accounting Pro reports group can open the two reports with the live figures of a period. Saved returns are not offered to them. They can read the box definitions.

Companies. Each user sees the returns, logs and FAF exports of their own companies only. Nobody, not even an administrator, can change or delete a return log or a FAF log.

The rules of the engine:

1. It reads posted journal items dated (accounting date) in the period, in the company currency.
2. It follows the rules of the Accounting Pro Tax Report: credit notes are negative, taxes included in the price, groups of taxes and tax on tax are handled, and a cash basis tax counts when the invoice is paid.
3. The base of a box is the balance of the journal items that carry the tax. The VAT is the balance of the tax journal items.
4. For reverse charge and imports, the negative tax lines are the VAT you account for (UAE boxes 3 and 6, KSA box 9). The positive lines in the tax closing are the recoverable VAT (box 10). Positive lines kept out of the tax closing (an expense account) are not recoverable.
5. Each box is rounded to the currency and the totals are added from the rounded boxes.
6. A saved return stores its figures, corrections and totals. The reconciliation compares the journal item part with the VAT accounts.

The tax point rules of the law (date of supply, receipt of payment, 30-day rules) are applied by the person who posts the documents: the add-on counts by accounting date.

Tested: 114 automated tests of the add-on, among them every UAE box worked out by hand, boxes tied to raw SQL, drill-downs that reproduce every cell, the FAF listings and ledger tied to the journal items, hostile texts in the FAF, the KSA boxes, security and company rules.

Replace the folder with the new version, restart Odoo and run -u taqnix_accounting_pro_gcc_vat. Your returns, their logs and the FAF exports are kept. The box definitions are not overwritten by an update, so your edits stay.

To remove the add-on, uninstall it from Apps. Take a backup first: the saved returns, their logs and the FAF exports are removed with it. Export your returns to PDF or Excel before you uninstall.

Installation help and bug fixes are included for 6 months, with lifetime updates. Contact us through the marketplace page where you bought the module or write to support@taqnix.com with your Odoo version and a screenshot.