PruvatoMost UAE trading companies have one document template. It started life as somebody's invoice in Word in about 2014. To make a quotation, you change the title at the top. To make a proforma, you change it again.
It works, mostly. It also quietly causes three different problems, and one of them is a tax problem.
Here's what actually belongs on a quotation in this market, why each field is there, and the line you shouldn't cross.
What belongs on it
Your legal name, address and TRN. The legal name: the one on the trade licence, with the LLC or FZE exactly as registered, not the trading name everyone uses on WhatsApp. The TRN is 15 digits. Put it on the quotation even though a quotation isn't a tax document, because your customer's accounts department will look for it before they raise a purchase order, and its absence costs you a day.
Their legal name, address and TRN. Same reasoning in reverse, with one addition: if they're the kind of customer who exists twice in your books under two spellings, the TRN is the thing that tells you it's the same company.
A unique quotation number. Not "QUOTE" with the date. A sequence you can search. When the customer calls in six weeks saying "about that quotation," you want to find it in ten seconds, and you want to be sure you're both looking at the same version.
Issue date and expiry date. The expiry is the one people skip, and it's the one that protects you. Copper moves, freight moves, the dirham doesn't but your supplier's price list does. A quotation with no stated validity is a quotation you can be held to in March at January's cost.
Line items with description, quantity, unit and unit price. The unit is not decoration. Cable priced per metre and cable priced per drum differ by a factor of a hundred, and "200" with no unit beside it is how that mistake gets made. State the unit on every line, including the obvious ones.
Part numbers, where you have them. Optional, and worth more than it costs. A quotation
that says NCN120A instead of "20A MCB" gives your customer a chance to object before
delivery rather than after, converting an argument about what they meant into a
conversation about something written down.
VAT shown separately. Not folded into the price. Show the taxable amount, the rate, the VAT, and the total, in AED. Even on a quotation, where no tax is due yet, the customer is comparing your number against someone else's and needs to know whether they're comparing the same thing.
Your bank details. Put them on the quotation, not just the invoice. It removes one email from the end of the process.
The line you shouldn't cross
A quotation is not a tax invoice, and it cannot become one by having the right fields.
Under the UAE VAT Executive Regulations, a compliant tax invoice must display the words "Tax Invoice" and carry a defined set of particulars: supplier legal name, address and TRN, buyer details, a unique sequential number, the date of issue, the date of supply, itemised descriptions, the VAT rate and a breakdown of tax in AED. Quotations and proforma invoices sit outside that definition. They are commercial documents, and your customer cannot recover input VAT against one.
Two practical consequences:
Don't title a quotation anything that reads as a tax document. If your template says "Tax Invoice" because it started life as one, and you've only changed the number sequence, you have a document that looks like it supports a VAT claim and doesn't.
Don't let a proforma do an invoice's job. Customers will sometimes pay against a proforma and then ask you for "the VAT invoice" afterwards. That's normal. What isn't normal is treating the proforma as having discharged the obligation: the tax invoice still has to be issued, and it has to be issued within 14 days of the date of supply.
Worth noting for completeness: a simplified tax invoice exists for supplies under AED 10,000 and for retail, which omits the buyer's details. It also can't be used to recover input VAT. For most B2B trading in this market it isn't the one you want.
VAT treatment: the part that goes wrong
Not everything you quote is standard-rated at 5%.
- Standard-rated: most goods and services supplied inside the UAE.
- Zero-rated: exports outside the GCC implementing states, among other categories. VAT applies at 0%; it still appears on the document.
- Exempt: a different thing from zero-rated, with different consequences for your own input VAT recovery. Not interchangeable, despite both showing nothing to pay.
- Out of scope: supplies that aren't in the UAE VAT net at all.
- Reverse charge: where the recipient accounts for the VAT rather than you. Common on imports and on some cross-border services.
Pick the wrong one on a quotation and nothing happens immediately. Pick the wrong one consistently and it shows up in a return.
If you're quoting across a free zone boundary, or to a customer outside the UAE, or on anything involving imported goods, this is worth ten minutes with your accountant once, rather than ten minutes of guessing per quote.
Arabic
You don't generally need a quotation in Arabic. You sometimes want one.
Where it matters: government and semi-government customers, some Emirati-owned contractors, and any situation where the document will be attached to something that is itself in Arabic. Where it doesn't: most private-sector trading, where English is the working language of procurement regardless of who owns the company.
A bilingual document (English and Arabic side by side rather than two separate files) covers both cases without you having to guess in advance. It costs nothing to produce and occasionally wins the kind of point that isn't about the price.
One thing to check about whatever tool you use
Your quotation contains your customer's name, what they're buying, and what you charge. That's commercially sensitive on both sides.
Most free quote generators ask for your email before they'll give you the PDF, which means the document, and your pricing, went to their server. Some of them say what happens to it afterwards. Many don't.
Worth checking, whatever you use.
The tool
We built Quote Studio gives you a correct quotation without building a template: your TRN and theirs, VAT shown properly, English and Arabic together, your logo and colours, a clean PDF. No account, and the draft never leaves your browser.
You still type every line yourself. That's the honest limit. It fixes the document, not the work of filling it in.
Filling it in is the slow part, and it's a different problem: knowing that "4 core 16mm armoured" is several products you stock, which one this customer means, and what they paid last time. That takes something that has read your catalogue, and it's what we're building now, with a small number of UAE electrical trading companies.
No account. Your draft stays in your browser and never reaches our servers. That's the design decision we're most pleased with, and the reason we can't offer you cloud saving. You can't have both.
Last reviewed 2 October 2026. If something here is wrong or has changed, tell us and we'll correct it.