Expenses + Live Tax Statements Are Live in Hisabi
Track every business expense with a receipt photo, then watch your VAT201, UAE Corporate Tax, P&L, and Cash Flow update in real time. The full bookkeeping loop — without leaving Hisabi.
Until today, Hisabi covered one half of bookkeeping beautifully — invoices, AED conversions, VAT calculation, FTA-compliant PDFs. The other half — expenses, receipts, and live financial statements — meant exporting CSVs and pasting them into a spreadsheet or sending the lot to your accountant once a quarter.
That changes today. Hisabi now ships an Expenses module and four live financial statements (VAT201, UAE Corporate Tax, Profit & Loss, and Cash Flow) that update the moment you log a receipt.
Log an Expense in Under 30 Seconds
Open /expenses, hit Add Expense, fill in the date, category, vendor, amount, and (optionally) the input VAT you paid. Drop in the receipt — JPG, PNG, HEIC, or PDF — and save. The receipt is uploaded directly to a private S3 bucket using a short-lived signed URL, so the file never touches our application servers.
- 16 GCC-tuned categories: Rent, Utilities, Salaries, COGS, Marketing, Travel, Software, Professional Fees, Office Supplies, Bank Fees, Government Fees, Telecom, Insurance, Repairs, Training, Other.
- Multi-currency in, AED out — log a USD SaaS subscription in USD; we convert at the day's rate for tax math.
- Separate paidAt date so cash flow reflects when money actually left the bank, not when the invoice was issued.
- Receipts encrypted at rest in AWS S3 with versioning enabled — accidental overwrite is recoverable.
Live VAT201
Go to /tax. The VAT tab shows your current FTA tax period with the four numbers that matter on the VAT201 form: Output VAT (collected from customers), Input VAT (paid on expenses with a TRN), Net VAT Payable (or refundable), and the breakdown by tax rate. Every figure is sourced from your invoices and expenses — no manual entry, no hidden adjustments.
UAE Corporate Tax — 9% Above the AED 375k Threshold
The Corporate Tax tab applies the FTA's Small Business Relief threshold automatically: zero tax on the first AED 375,000 of taxable income, 9% on the rest. Allowable expenses (net of recoverable input VAT, so you don't double-deduct) are subtracted from net revenue. You get an estimate good enough for board meetings and capital planning — not a substitute for your tax filing, but a real-time signal of where you stand.
Profit & Loss + Cash Flow
P&L groups revenue and expenses by month for the current FY: gross revenue, total expenses, net profit, and gross margin %. Cash Flow uses paidAt dates instead of invoice dates — so a January invoice paid in April hits April's inflow row, exactly as your bank statement shows it.
Both statements export to CSV in one click. Hand it to your accountant; they'll thank you.
How It's Built
Each expense is one row in Postgres with a foreign key to your user. Receipts live in a dedicated S3 bucket; the URL you see is a 5-minute signed view link, regenerated on every request. Heavy report bundles (a full FY VAT + CT + P&L + Cash Flow CSV in a single file) are generated by a Lambda worker triggered through SQS — so building one never blocks your dashboard.
Privacy: a receipt is only ever fetchable by you. Even with the S3 key, no one else can read it. Delete an expense and the receipt is hard-deleted from S3 in the same request.
What's Next
Recurring expenses (your monthly Adobe subscription shouldn't need re-entry every month), bank statement import (drop a CSV from Emirates NBD or ADCB and let AI categorise it), and an AI receipt scanner that pulls vendor + total + VAT from a photo. All on the roadmap, all coming this quarter.