KRA eTIMS for pharmacies, in plain language

eTIMS is the Kenya Revenue Authority’s electronic Tax Invoice Management System. In plain terms, it is the mechanism by which an invoice you issue is transmitted to KRA in a form it recognises, rather than existing only on your own receipt roll.

The official description, the onboarding routes and the current rules live on KRA’s own eTIMS page. We are deliberately pointing you there rather than restating the detail here: tax rules change, this page will not change on the same day, and a pharmacy acting on a stale summary is worse off than one reading the source.

The obligation follows your tax status, not your trade. The question is whether your business is registered for VAT, and beyond that whether the wider electronic invoicing requirements reach you. It is not something a pharmacy is exempt from by virtue of being a pharmacy.

This is a question for your accountant or for KRA directly, and it is worth asking plainly rather than assuming. Two pharmacies on the same street can be in different positions depending on turnover and registration.

A point worth knowing before any vendor sells you a solution: KRA provides more than one route, and some of them need no point-of-sale software at all. Broadly, there are options aimed at smaller businesses that issue invoices through a KRA-provided channel, and options where your own system is integrated so invoices flow automatically.

The second is more convenient at a busy counter. The first exists so that being small is not a barrier. Which route suits you is a question about invoice volume and how your counter runs, and the current list of routes is on KRA’s page above.

“eTIMS compliant” is doing a lot of work in most marketing copy. Useful follow-up questions:

• Does the system transmit invoices itself, or does it produce a file somebody uploads?
• Whose credentials does it use, and what happens when they need renewing?
• What happens to a sale made while the connection is down?
• Is it included in the price, or a separate charge?
• Who is responsible if an invoice fails to transmit and nobody notices?

That last one matters most. Software can help you comply. It cannot take on the obligation, which remains the business’s.

Plainly, because you should not have to work it out from careful wording: Optima does not submit invoices to KRA eTIMS today. If eTIMS transmission is the reason you are buying software this month, Optima does not yet solve that for you.

It is on our roadmap and it is one of the things we are building next. We are not putting a date on this page, because a date we then miss is worse than no date at all.

What Optima does today is the rest of the counter: sales and M-Pesa, batch and expiry control, purchasing, shifts and cash reconciliation, stock takes and reports, all running on your own computer with no internet required. If that is useful to you now, the trial is seven days and costs nothing. If eTIMS is the deciding factor, we would rather you knew before you paid.

Confirm your own position with KRA or your accountant, rather than with a software vendor whose answer conveniently matches what they sell. Then, when comparing systems, ask the compliance questions above alongside the ones in our buyer’s guide, and get the answers in writing.