The excise tax period is the Gregorian month. The return and the payment are both due by the 15th day of the month following the period, so January 2026 is due by 15 February 2026. Excise has no quarterly option to fall back on and no long filing window to absorb a slow close — twelve deadlines a year, each one two weeks after the month ends. Source: Excise Executive Regulation (Cabinet Decision 37/2017), Arts. 17–19.

The click path. Open Accounting → Reporting → UAE Excise Return. It is an interactive dashboard rather than a static report: excise by category with a summary of tax due, deductible and net payable, KPI tiles, a chart, a period selector, comparison periods, drill-down from any figure to the declarations behind it, and XLSX / PDF export. Set the period to January 2026 and Marina Beverages' month reads like this.

Every figure on that screen is provable. 6,212.40 is the three drinks from Lesson 2, and clicking it opens the Import declaration that carries them. 68,400.00 is 7,200 units at the 9.50 excise price that the register resolved in Lesson 5. Tax due is the two added together, 74,612.40, and net payable is that less the 3,150.00 deduction, which is 71,462.40 — the amount due at the FTA by 15 February 2026. Use the drill-down before you file, not after somebody queries a number.

Filing takes a snapshot, and the snapshot is the point. Save the period and it is stored as an immutable record; the filed archive lives under Accounting → Reporting → Excise Returns (Filed), where Mark Filed locks it. Ledgers and stock records keep moving after a filing — a late correction, a returned pallet, a price adjustment backdated into the register — so re-running the report next year will not necessarily reproduce the number you submitted. Without a snapshot you cannot answer the question an auditor will actually ask, which is not "what does the system say now" but "what did you file, and why is it different now".

Now the lesson that saves the support call: a zero excise amount on a declaration line has three different causes. Two are defects and one is the system working correctly, and they are indistinguishable on screen — the same zero, on the same line, in the same column.

The third one is correct, and it is the reason you cannot treat a zero as an alarm and clear the list. Diagnose by mechanic: look at the category first, because it tells you which of the three questions to ask, and only then at the product's price entry or its litres. Palm Sparkling will show AED 0.00 on every declaration for as long as its recipe stands, and that zero is as filed-ready as any other figure on the return.

Two more things that produce an empty screen, and neither is a zero on a line. If the return shows no figures at all for a period, the usual causes are declarations still sitting in draft — the return aggregates confirmed declarations only, unless Include draft is on — or dates falling outside the selected period, or a different company selected. And if the Excise TRN is blank on the return header and on the PDF export, the field is empty on the company record; the return reads it directly from the company, so fill it in there rather than looking for it on the report.