Your team's parking receipts just became a VAT question

Picture the end of the month at a twelve person company in Dubai. Someone opens the expenses folder. There are fuel slips, a stack of parking tickets, a hotel bill from the Abu Dhabi trip, team lunches, two mobile bills. Half the receipts are photos in a WhatsApp chat. Nobody wrote down who approved what.

Until now a lot of businesses treated the VAT on those costs loosely. Some claimed all of it, some claimed none of it to stay safe. Both cost money, one way or the other.

What changed

FTA Decision No. 17 of 2026 sets out the cases and conditions for recovering input tax on employee expenses. It was issued on 9 September 2026 and applies from 1 October 2026. It covers things a business provides to staff under the employment contract or a written company policy, such as transport, food and drink, accommodation, mobile and internet, and parking.

The common thread in the conditions is evidence. A written policy that says what the company pays for. An approval step. And a record of each payment. For parking, the commentary on the decision points to keeping the date, time, amount and VAT of each payment.

None of that is unreasonable. It is just not how a small company usually handles a parking ticket.

Where it goes wrong

The receipt lives in an employee's phone. It reaches the bookkeeper three weeks later, if at all. The approval was a thumbs up in a chat. The VAT amount is not on the photo because the photo is blurry. When the return is prepared, the choice is to claim it without support or to drop it. Over a year, across a team, that is a real number either way.

What fixing it looks like at your size

You don't need an expense platform with forty features. You need three habits to happen without anyone remembering them:

• The receipt is captured on the day, with the amount and VAT read off it and checked.
• It is matched to the policy category and to the person who approved it.
• Anything missing a VAT amount or an approval is flagged that week, not at the return.

That is the boring part a workflow does well. A person still decides the odd cases, like a client dinner or a trip that mixed business and personal days.

Where we come in

At Finamatik we build that kind of flow inside the tools you already use, on your own accounts, and it stays yours. Everything we show publicly is built and tested on sample data. If you want to talk through how your expenses move today, there's a free twenty minute call at finamatik.com/book.

Read the decision itself on the FTA website, or ask your tax adviser how it applies to your policy. This piece is general information, not tax advice.