Is my currect quickbooks setup suitable for VAT compliance in Oman?

It’s nice to see you in the Community, sheetal-kansara-.

All QBO versions are designed to track VAT. In some countries, QuickBooks Online offers customers the ability to select from a list of commonly-used (VAT/GST/GCT/IVA/ITBIS/TOT) rates.

These rates are provided for informational purposes. We recommend consulting an accountant or tax advisors regarding the applicability of these tax rates.

You can read through this write-up for additional information: How do I set up sales GST/VAT rates and use them on forms?

If you wish to activate the sales tax feature, let me guide you through the steps. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Taxes menu on the left panel to open the Sales Tax Setup page and Set up tax.
2. In the Set up sales tax screen, fill in the fields with your tax information and click Next.
3. Hit OK to open the Sales Tax Center.

We collated resources to help our customers manage their taxes and forms. These resources contain topics about processing VAT, GST, sales tax adjustments, and other tax activities: QBO guide.

Stay in touch if you have other concerns or questions about the product. I’ll be right here to answer them for you. Have a great week ahead.  

@sheetal-kansara- 

You can use QBO Global version for Oman to support your business but you have to configure some settings manually to comply with your VAT requirement.

https://quickbooks.grsm.io/Middle-East

According to the regulations from the Oman Tax Authority, taxpayers are supposed to record item details like VAT rate, place of supply, and value of supply. This will help determine what VAT rates will be applicable when these items are being imported or exported in Oman. For determining the value of items, there are three tax categories: standard rate (5%), zero-rate, and exempt. You may pre-define these tax categories and simply select them from a dropdown menu when you are recording transactions.

To save time on defining the tax value of every item, another accounting app allows you to create groups of similar items containing shared attributes. For example, let us assume that you are the owner of an electronics showroom in Oman. Among other goods, you sell five types of refrigerators, and they all receive the same tax treatment. You could set up the tax settings for each type of refrigerator individually in QBO. On another app, you can make an item group for refrigerators, with all five types included, and set up the tax settings just once for the whole group. When you create a transaction for the sale of any of your types of refrigerator, you'll just need to select what kind of transaction it is, such as within Oman or outside the GCC. This accounting app will then use the tax settings you configured for the whole group of refrigerators to calculate the VAT on that particular sale.

As I mentioned earlier, you will need to know whether a transaction is an import or an export and what the place of supply is to determine what VAT rates will be applicable on it. You have to entering the rates of goods and services manually for all of these different situations. On another app, with one-time setup, you can accurately record your purchase and sales transactions, and generate invoices containing multiple items and multiple tax rates. You may generate invoices in multiple currencies and then covert them into your base currency (i.e., Omani Rial). Don't forget to categorize your contacts (customers and vendors) into VAT registered, non-VAT registered, GCC non-VAT registered, and non-GCC. One accounting app has a feature to validate the TRN to make sure it is the correct one. 

For example, let us assume that you are supplying goods to a customer in Singapore. For VAT purposes, all exports from Oman will be considered zero-rated. In this case, you can select the VAT treatment of non-GCC from the dropdown, the default place of supply will be set as Oman, and you can select the currency of Singapore Dollars from the dropdown. Once this is done, the tax rate of zero will be applied to the supplies mentioned in that transaction automatically (afaik, we have to set this up manually on QBO). The user need not set each and every supply in the transaction as zero-rated. Specifying VAT treatment this way will also help you sort your transactions while filing VAT returns later.

Hope it helps.