When you cannot invoice through eTIMS
What Kenya's Electronic Tax Invoice Regulations require when your eTIMS system is down, how to record sales meanwhile, and an outage log worth keeping.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Running a business businesses in Kenya
It is the busiest Saturday of the month and the eTIMS screen will not load. The internet is down, or the device has frozen, or the system simply refuses to issue an invoice. Customers are queuing. Do you stop selling, keep selling and hope, or do something in between?
Kenya's Electronic Tax Invoice Regulations anticipate exactly this situation, and they give a business three things to do. None of them is "stop trading". This article sets out the rule, what to do on the day, how to catch up afterwards, and how to make outages less likely and less painful.
The baseline: every sale through the system
Start with what normally applies. The Tax Procedures (Electronic Tax Invoice) Regulations, 2024, which commenced on 28 March 2024, require every person carrying on business, unless exempted under section 23A of the Tax Procedures Act, to record each sale in the system, generate an invoice for each sale through it, give the invoice to the buyer and transmit the invoice details to the Commissioner.
An outage interrupts all four steps at once. The Regulations deal with that interruption directly. For an overview of the Regulations as a whole, see the Electronic Tax Invoice Regulations, 2024.
The written notice within twenty-four hours
Regulation 5 requires a user who cannot use the system to notify the Commissioner in writing within twenty-four hours.
Twenty-four hours is not long, especially over a weekend. Prepare a short template now, so that on the day someone only has to fill in the details:
- your business name and PIN;
- which eTIMS solution or device has failed, and at which branch;
- when the problem started;
- what has been done to fix it;
- how you are recording sales in the meantime.
Keep a copy of the notice and a record of how and when it was sent.
KRA's legal basis for all of this is in the Electronic Tax Invoice Regulations on Kenya Law, where regulation 5 covers what to do when the system cannot be used.
Recording sales by other means
The same regulation requires the user to record sales by other means the Commissioner specifies. The Regulations do not leave the method to the business, so follow KRA's instructions for your situation, and ask KRA if you are unsure what applies.
Whatever method is used, record each sale fully: date and time, customer, items, quantities, prices and the buyer's PIN where the customer is a business that will claim the expense. You will need all of it shortly.
Entering the backlog once the system is restored
Regulation 5 also requires those sales to be entered into the system once it is restored. The outage does not cancel the duty to invoice; it postpones it.
When the system comes back:
- Enter each sale recorded during the outage, in order.
- Check that the totals match what you recorded by hand.
- Give customers their electronic invoices where they need them, especially businesses that will claim the expense.
- Close the outage in your log, noting when the backlog was cleared.
Offline-capable solutions reduce the risk
Some eTIMS solutions handle a dropped connection better than others. KRA says the online portal, eCitizen and OSCU need a stable internet connection, while the eTIMS Client and VSCU keep invoicing offline and transmit when connectivity returns, and USSD invoicing on *222# needs no internet at all.
If outages are frequent where you trade, that is a reason to look again at your solution. A connection problem is a far smaller event when the system keeps invoicing through it. Choosing the right eTIMS solution compares the options.
How Achekam marks invoices not yet fiscalised
Achekam does not send invoices to eTIMS itself today, so an eTIMS outage does not stop you recording sales in your books. The two are linked by hand: once the invoice has been issued through eTIMS, the business records in Achekam the control-unit invoice number, internal data and receipt signature, and a second person verifies them before the invoice counts as fiscalised.
That gives you a clear picture after an outage. Achekam prints eTIMS identifiers on an invoice only once it is fiscalised; until then, the document says it is not yet fiscalised. And when a Kenyan VAT return is prepared in Achekam, it lists the period's invoices, credit notes and till sales that are not fiscalised. The list does not block the return, but it shows exactly which sales from the outage still need to go through eTIMS. More on that in unfiscalised sales on a Kenyan VAT return.
Achekam's till has its own protection against connection problems. If the connection drops, till sales are kept in the browser, survive a page reload and are sent again when the connection returns, and a resent sale is never recorded twice.
An outage log worth keeping
Keep one simple log for every eTIMS failure, however short:
| Column | What to record |
|---|---|
| Start | Date and time the system stopped |
| Where | Branch, till or device |
| Cause | Connection, device, KRA system, unknown |
| Notice | When the written notice went to the Commissioner |
| Sales | How many sales were recorded by other means |
| Restored | Date and time the system came back |
| Backlog | When every sale was entered into eTIMS |
Over a year, the log tells you whether outages are rare accidents or a pattern worth fixing, and it is your evidence if KRA ever asks.
Write the notice template and the log today, and keep both where the person closing the shop can find them.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
