Set up your account
Before an invoice can be filed there has to be an account, an entity, and the people who work on it. How the first two come into existence depends on which environment you are in — in production they are created for you, and creating them by hand is a development-server thing for testing. Everything after that is identical in both.
Production: your FTA onboarding creates both
You do not sign up here, and you do not add your company by hand. You onboard yourself on the FTA portal, and that registration creates your TaxStar account and your company entity automatically.
The entity arrives with its TRN on it and its onboarding already done. The first time you sign in, your company is simply there — ready to be connected to your accounting system.
Because the entity comes from the registration rather than from a form, its details are the registered ones by definition. There is no typo to make in a TRN you never typed, and no way to end up with two entities filing as the same company.
| What the entity holds | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| Legal name | The name filed on the invoice, as registered. |
| TRN | 15 digits. This is what identifies you to the FTA on every document you send. |
| Trade licence number and issuing authority | Your legal registration, filed alongside the TRN. |
| Address, city and emirate | The emirate is filed as the region — it is not optional for a UAE seller. |
Development server: create them by hand, to test
The development server has no FTA registration behind it, so nothing can be created for you there. That is the one place you sign up for an account yourself and add an entity yourself, with a valid TRN — precisely so you can rehearse the rest of the flow before it counts.
This is a testing route, not a way in. A live client never creates an account or an entity this way, and an entity created here exists on the development server only — it files nothing and is registered with nobody.
Fill the details in as they are registered anyway. Testing against a company that does not resemble your real one tells you less than you think, and the fields are the same four above.
From here, both environments are identical
This is what makes the development server useful: once the entity exists, nothing downstream knows or cares how it got there. The same screens, the same mapping, the same rules, the same journey to the network.
| Connect your accounting system | One authorisation per entity, to QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, Odoo, Wafeq or Naqood. |
| Complete the PINT Mapping | Pre-fill defaults at the top, then review every field. Mark anything your system does not hold as provided at invoice level. |
| Prepare the customer records | The buyer's tax number and address have to exist inside your own ERP. One-time work per customer. |
| Raise invoices as you always have | They are read out of the ERP, staged if a value is still owed, approved if the entity requires it, then filed. |
So a client who tested on the development server has already done the real thing. Only the first two rows of their production account — the account and the entity — arrive by a different route.
Invite the people who will use it
People are invited to an entity, with a role on that entity. Someone can be an Admin on one company and a Viewer on another, which is what makes shared bookkeeping work without sharing logins.
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Admin | The person who created the entity, plus anyone they make an Admin. Full access, and the only role that can make, change or remove an Admin, or delete the entity. |
| Editor | Everything an Admin does day to day, people included — but cannot make, change or remove an Admin, and cannot delete the entity. |
| Approver | Invoice approval only — view, comment, approve, reject. Reads the entity but changes nothing else about it, which is the point of the role. |
| Viewer | Read-only. Sees the entity, its invoices and its settings, changes none of it, and cannot approve. For an auditor or anyone who only needs to look. |
An invitation goes out by email, the person opens the link, and they have access once they accept it — not before. They need an account on TaxStar for the invitation to attach to.
Approver is worth setting up deliberately if your finance process needs a second pair of eyes: invoices can be held for approval before they are filed. The full permission list, and who can invite whom, is on Users and roles.
What comes next
Connect the system your invoices already live in — that is the next page. Before you do, it is worth reading the ERP prerequisites, because the customer records in that system need work that is easier to do up front than one rejection at a time.