Start with the obligation, because the software only follows it. Excise tax is charged once, when goods enter free circulation in the UAE: on import, on production for consumption here, and on release from a Designated Zone. It is not a transaction tax like VAT, it does not sit on every invoice, and it is not recovered along a supply chain the way input VAT is. It attaches to events, and the whole of this course is about recording those events correctly.

Cabinet Decision 197 of 2025 replaced the excise goods list outright. It was issued on 27 November 2025, took effect on 1 January 2026, and repealed Cabinet Decision 52 of 2019 in full. If your product classifications, your category names or your understanding of the rules date from 2019, they describe a decision that no longer exists. Source: Cabinet Decision 197/2025, Arts. 2 and 14.

Article 2 lists five excise goods, and only five:

Carbonated drinks is no longer a standalone category. Under the 2019 list it was an excise good in its own right. It does not appear in Article 2. A carbonated drink is now taxed only if it falls inside one of the five that remain — in practice as a sweetened drink, on the volumetric tiers in Lesson 2, or as an energy drink if it answers that description. Carbonated water with no sweetener sits outside the list altogether.

Several official web pages have not caught up with this. You will still find 2019-era category lists in circulation, and a learner who checks a summary page against this course may conclude that we are wrong. Cite Cabinet Decision 197/2025 whenever you are asked to justify a classification, and put a date on every figure you rely on. Lesson 2 covers a live discrepancy on the FTA's own website.

One further change is announced but not yet in force. The Ministry of Finance announced on 6 August 2026 a minimum excise price of AED 1 per millilitre on liquids used in electronic smoking devices, taking effect on 1 September 2026 — two weeks after the date on which the figures in this course were verified. The announcement confirms the amount and the date but does not name the instrument that carries them, and we were unable to locate that instrument. Treat the amount and the date as announced rather than as a citation, obtain the decision before you rely on it in a filing, and check now whether your e-liquid pricing has to change on 1 September 2026.

Where this lands in Odoone. Open Accounting → Configuration → UAE Excise → Excise Categories. The module ships with categories already seeded: tobacco, electronic smoking devices, their liquids and energy drinks at 100%, and one category covering carbonated and sweetened drinks together on the 2026 sugar tiers. You need the Manager level of the UAE Excise privilege to open that menu at all; a User sees the return, the declarations and the filed archive, but not the configuration.

The failure mode: a category name that predates the law. The seeded carbonated-and-sweetened category carries the old pairing in its label, and being tiered-volumetric it will apply the sugar tiers to everything assigned to it. That is the right arithmetic for a sweetened carbonated drink and the wrong home for an unsweetened one, which should not be an excise good at all. Read your category list against the five goods in Article 2, rename anything misleading, and confirm that every product sitting in that category really is a sweetened drink.