The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) has said the introduction of the Fiscalisation Data Management System (FDMS) will go a long way to reduce compliance costs and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in Zimbabwe.
Fiscalisation according to Zimra refers to configuring of fiscal devices to enable them to record sales and other tax information on the read only fiscal memory (fiscal devices) at the same time of sale for use by the tax authority in value added tax administration (Statutory Instrument (S.I) 104 of 2010).
The revenue authority recently introduced the system in August, an integrated fiscalisation back-end solution that is focused on interfacing with most of the existing and installed hardware fiscal devices at taxpayers’ points of sale.
Recently unpacking the FDMS in a webinar hosted by the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC), ZIMRA representative Mr Jeremiah Makumba said FDMS will introduce virtual fiscalisation solutions to harness opportunities presented by digitalisation.
“S.I 153 of 2016 requires every registered operator to connect all fiscal devices to the ZIMRA server for the purposes of transmitting sales data. The introduction of FDMS has been brought about by the challenges that were being experienced by the current system such as the non-standardisation of fiscal devices that were being supplied by approved suppliers and system inaccessibility by all stakeholders,” he said.
“The new FDMS system is applicable to both VAT and non-VAT clients. FDMS will offer self-service facilities to taxpayers, approved suppliers and manufacturers of fiscal devices, thereby providing a reliable fiscal solution for Zimra.”
He said features of the system will include simplifying registration of fiscal devices and managing the generation of fiscal tax invoices, debit or credit notes.
Mr Makumba said it will also provide a platform for verifying and authenticating fiscal tax invoice, credit or debit notes-confirmation of genuine invoices through self-service login into FDMS and scanning of QR codes to prevent fraud.
He added: “The FDMS will provide an online platform for taxpayers to be able to report and acquit errors on their fiscal devices, while it will allow for opening and closing of a new fiscal day before and after issuing receipts and invoices thereby controlling the opening and closing of fiscal days.”
Mr Makumba said among other key features were tracking and checking the distribution of authentic fiscal devices from approved manufacturers to taxpayers, online device monitoring-time tracking facility from opening of a fiscal day and compatibility with both online mode and offline mode among others.
He said through FDMS, Zimra was introducing virtual fiscalisation solutions, which are software-based devices to harness opportunities presented by digitalisation as well as reducing the cost burden of complying with fiscalisation requirements as virtual fiscalisation is provisioned by Section 80DD in the Income Tax Act and Section 68 CC of the VAT Act.
“Through FDMS, Zimra has developed retail point of sales (POS) applications in two separate applications that are mobile POS application for android operating system and desktop POS application for windows operating system. FDMS is also allowing for direct application programming interface (API) integration with the taxpayers retail or accounting systems,” he added.
Mr Makumba said the roles of taxpayers under FDMS are to acquire appropriate fiscal devices from approved suppliers, register the fiscal devices with Zimra through FDMS and install the fiscal device on every POS, among others.
