Paste your customer and supplier list. This sorts the records into what to do next: which numbers are malformed, who genuinely needs chasing, and whose registration status you have to establish before writing to anyone.
One per line. The first three columns are what most exports give you; the last two make the result far more useful, and you can leave them out.
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
name | As it appears in your ledger. Commas are fine if the field is quoted. |
country | Two-letter code (AE, SA, IN) or a name. |
tax number | Leave blank where you hold none. Blank is an answer, not an omission. |
vat registeredoptional |
yes, no, or leave blank for unknown. This is the column that
decides whether a missing number is a gap or the correct state of affairs. |
roleoptional |
customer or supplier — client, buyer, vendor, seller, AR and
AP are read too. This column changes the answer where a tax number is missing:
ibr-047-ae gives a supplier no blank option at all, while
ibr-041-ae lets a customer be identified another way. Leave it out and those
rows come back with both readings instead of one. |
Every genuine gap above is a letter to somebody else's finance team, a reminder two weeks later, and a reply that arrives in a format you did not ask for. This is the phase that quietly consumes a month of somebody's calendar, and it cannot start until it starts. The first job is not writing the letters — it is working out which of the blanks deserve one.
We run it as a campaign: we prepare the letters and the follow-up schedule, track who has replied, parse the answers and report on who never responded. By default you send them, because correspondence going out under your name is your decision. If you would rather we sent them, that needs a written authority and an approved template first.
A UAE tax registration number is fifteen digits, begins with 1 and
ends with 03. A number that is held and does not match this fails
ibr-132-ae.
Read that rule carefully, because it is easy to get backwards. Its context is a
VAT identifier that exists: it constrains the shape of a number that is present, and it
cannot fire on an empty field. An absent number is a different question, answered by
different rules — ibr-135-ae accepts a buyer identifier as an alternative to
the VAT identifier, and ibr-136-ae and ibr-149-ae demand a legal
registration identifier in their own specific scenarios. Which of them applies depends on
the transaction type flags and the electronic address scheme.
The practical consequence: a missing tax number is not automatically a rejection, and chasing every blank is the wrong first move. Establish who is registered, then write only to those.
| Situation | What the specification expects |
|---|---|
| UAE business customer, VAT-registered | The VAT identifier is the natural one to carry, and if it is held it must match the format above. |
| UAE customer not VAT-registered | No tax number exists — but you need to know that, and record it, rather than discovering it at submission. |
| Overseas customer | No UAE tax number. Other identifiers apply, and for exports a full delivery address with a subdivision becomes mandatory. |
| Any counterparty | An electronic address is needed to route the document at all. Most companies hold none today. |
Accounting systems do not ask for a counterparty tax number when you create the record. In some, the field does not even appear until a checkbox is ticked — and the checkbox is off by default. So a company can trade with a supplier for years without ever being prompted, and the gap only surfaces when the first invoice is rejected.
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