Start with the obligation, because most of the anxiety around the FAF comes from misreading it. The FTA Audit File is specified in the FTA's Requirements Document for Tax Accounting Software, dated October 2017. That document sets out what accredited tax accounting software must be able to do, and the FAF appears there as a software capability requirement rather than as a standing filing obligation on every taxpayer. You do not submit a FAF each quarter the way you submit a VAT 201. You have to be able to produce one on the FTA's request, and in practice that request arrives as part of an audit.

The specification has not been updated since. The version is FAFv1.0.0, and it is still FAFv1.0.0 today. There is no FAF v2. There is no XML or SAF-T format waiting to replace the CSV. And the FAF is entirely separate from the PINT AE e-invoicing framework — a different obligation, a different format, a different timetable, a different set of systems. Say this plainly to anyone who asks, because everything else in UAE tax has moved since 2017 and people reasonably assume this has too.

The technical constraints are short and absolute. The file must be comma-separated values (.csv). It must not be an image — a scan, a photograph or a PDF of a spreadsheet does not satisfy the requirement. And the user must not be able to modify any value in it. The one thing the user does choose is the period the file spans.

There are two variants: the FTA VAT Audit File and the FTA Excise Tax Audit File. Each has the same three-table structure — Company Information, Purchase Listing and Supply Listing — and each of those tables carries header, body and footer rows. Lesson 2 takes that structure apart. Be precise about what the module covers as well: its guide describes producing the seven-section VAT-side file, and it does not describe producing the Excise Tax Audit File variant, so do not promise your auditor one on the strength of this course.

One point to settle with your own management before an audit rather than during one. Producing a FAF closes nothing. Receiving one does not remove the FTA's ability to verify original records, so the invoices, contracts, customs papers and bank statements behind the file matter exactly as much as they did before. The file makes your data reviewable at speed; it does not stand in for the evidence.

Two things we could not source, and you should not assume. The Requirements Document specifies the file rather than the procedure around it: it does not state how long you have to produce a FAF once the FTA asks, and no instrument setting a penalty for failing to produce one was available to us. Work on the basis that the answer is immediately, from a system that is already configured, put any deadline you are actually given in front of your advisor, and do not repeat a number that nobody can cite.

Where this lands in Odoone. The generation wizard is at Accounting → Reporting → FTA Audit File (FAF). The archive and the tax-code mapping are at Accounting → Configuration → FTA Audit File (FAF). Everything in this course happens in those two places, and there are no Settings toggles to find first.

The failure mode: the menu is not there. If FTA Audit File (FAF) does not appear under Accounting → Reporting, the user is not in the module's access groups. An administrator opens Settings → Users, selects the user and sets the UAE FTA Audit File privilege to User — who runs the wizard and views archived files and the mapping — or Manager, who can also edit the mapping and regenerate a file. The configuration submenu is visible to Managers only.