eTIMS turned your invoice into an electronic record that lives with KRA. Here's a plain-English walkthrough of who it affects, how issuance works, and the mistakes that quietly cost SMEs money.
The electronic Tax Invoice Management System is KRA's platform for issuing and storing tax invoices. When you issue through eTIMS, three things happen: the invoice is generated with the correct fields, a unique control number is assigned, and the record lands in KRA's systems. The QR code on the invoice simply encodes that record so anyone can verify it.
The mental shift matters: the paper or PDF you send the client is a copy. The electronic record in eTIMS is the invoice.
The mechanics are straightforward: you raise the invoice in an eTIMS-enabled system, KRA validates it, and the system returns the invoice with its control number and QR. Credit notes go through the same channel — an adjustment made outside eTIMS leaves your sales figures and your returns telling different stories, which is exactly the discrepancy an audit flags.
What this means practically is that your invoicing software should be speaking to eTIMS on your behalf — not that you should be typing invoices into a government portal by hand at month-end.
Scan the QR with the KRA app and the invoice resolves against the national record in seconds. Two consequences follow:
Enforcement timelines and thresholds have moved before and can move again. Confirm the current position on the KRA eTIMS portal before building your process around this guide.
The businesses that cope with eTIMS best don't think about eTIMS at all — their invoicing system handles it in the background. The invoice they send carries the QR, the record exists with KRA, and the matching payment gets attached to the same file. That's the loop described in our KRA-ready invoice guide.
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