4 minute read
What eTIMS actually means for your business
It applies to you whether or not you are registered for VAT, and from the 2026 year of income your customers cannot claim what they paid you without an eTIMS invoice.
Most of what is written about eTIMS is written for accountants. This is written for the person who runs the business and needs to know what to do about it.
## What it is
eTIMS is KRA's electronic Tax Invoice Management System. Every invoice you raise is transmitted to KRA and carries a control code proving it was.
## Who it applies to
Everyone. This is the point most often got wrong. eTIMS is not a VAT thing. It applies whether or not you are registered for VAT, whether you raise ten invoices a month or ten thousand, and whether you are a limited company or a sole trader.
## Why it is urgent rather than administrative
Two reasons, and the second is the one that costs you money.
The first is penalties. Non-compliance carries penalties reaching KES 1,000,000.
The second matters more day to day. From the 2026 year of income, an expense that is not supported by an eTIMS invoice is disallowed. Read that from your customer's side: if they cannot get an eTIMS invoice from you, they cannot claim what they paid you, which makes buying from you more expensive than buying from somebody who can issue one. Sooner or later they do the arithmetic.
This is why businesses that are not worried about KRA should still be worried about eTIMS. It is not primarily a compliance problem. It is a competitiveness problem.
## There is more than one way to do it
This is the part nobody explains. eTIMS is not one system; it is several, and which one suits you depends on how you invoice.
A consultant raising a handful of invoices a month can work from a phone or a browser. A shop ringing up hundreds of sales a day needs it connected to the till, because typing every sale into a second system at the end of the day is a job nobody will do for long. A business already running an accounting package usually wants that package to talk to eTIMS directly.
Getting this choice right is most of the work. Getting it wrong means somebody does double entry forever.
## What to do this month
Count how many invoices you raise in a typical month, and note what you raise them from: a book, a spreadsheet, a till, an accounting package. Those two answers determine which method fits.
Then get registered. Registration is not the hard part and it does not depend on deciding everything else first.
If you already run a point of sale or an accounting package, find out whether it can connect. Most of the current ones can.
## Keeping the records straight
Once invoices go through eTIMS, KRA holds a copy of every one of them. That changes what an untidy record costs you. A sale entered twice, an invoice raised to the wrong PIN, or a credit note that was never issued now shows up on KRA's side as well as yours.
Three habits prevent most of it. Take your customer's KRA PIN before you raise the invoice, not afterwards. Cancel a wrong invoice with a proper credit note rather than simply raising a second one. And once a month, compare what your own books say you invoiced with what the eTIMS portal says you invoiced. If the two agree, you are in good shape. If they do not, it is far easier to find out why in the same month than a year later.
## What a consultant cannot do for you
Setting up eTIMS is not the same as advising you on tax. Anybody who sets your system up should be clear about which of those they are doing.
We set the system up and make it work. What you declare, and how you treat a particular transaction, is a matter for a tax agent. If you do not have one, get one. That is not a sales pitch, it is the position.