Getting Started with DigiTax

Overview of how to get started with DigiTax. You'll be up and running in a jiffy!

Why DigiTax

DigiTax is your digital solution for effective, simple and painless tax compliance. Our APIs enable businesses to transmit VAT invoices directly to tax authorities in real-time.

Some contextual history

KRA (Kenya Revenue Authority) is an agency of the government of Kenya that is responsible for the assessment, collection and accounting for all revenues that are due to the government in accordance with the laws of Kenya. One type of tax is the VAT (Value-Added Tax), which is filed monthly by eligible taxpayers.

In 2005, the ETR (Electronic Tax Register) was launched. Later, on 1st August 2021, TIMS (Tax Invoice Management System) was rolled out. This upgraded version of the ETR system required all VAT-registered taxpayers to upgrade their ETR machines to comply with the Value Added Tax (Electronic Tax Invoice) Regulations, 2020.

More recently, KRA launched eTIMS (Electronic TIMS). eTIMS is here to help more taxpayers become compliant (no need of having ETR devices). Once on-boarded to eTIMS, you get to leverage the technological convenience this software solution provides.

Enter DigiTax

DigiTax is a solution that sits between you, a VAT-registered taxpayer, and KRA's eTIMS system.

Instead of onboarding directly onto eTIMS, a process that requires significant resource investment, both time and technical resources, we do the heavy lifting for you - Making tax compliance less taxing.

What can DigiTax help me with?

Our APIs are designed to optimize VAT filing in the following ways:

  • Asynchronous functionality that automatically retries eTIMS (or any other tax agency database). This mitigates against duplication of invoices and associated tax obligations
  • Able to guarantee that the same invoice won't be submitted more than once
  • Recording of purchases in addition to sales to ensure all VAT-related data is accessible in a single place
  • Throttling between the businesses throughput and eTIMS. A business only needs to send an invoice once, and DigiTax will process the information thereafter based on eTIMS capacity at that particular point in time
  • Real-time notifications
  • Priority support
  • 19 different integration programming languages to select from
  • Simple integration. We’ve streamlined integration to approximately 2 hours and 5 endpoints that can be tested here
  • 99.99% uptime
  • Queuing and scaling (allowing us to support any amount of volume)
  • Intuitive Dashboard for you and your stakeholders

Guaranteed safety and integrity

We comply with best industry practices, including:

There are various industry standards for API platforms, but some of the most common ones include:

  1. RESTful APIs
  2. OpenAPI (formerly Swagger): An open-source standard that allows a standardised way to generate, document, and test our APIs.
  3. Secure authentication with cryptographically signed JWTs (JSON Web Tokens)