Compliance should be the boring part.
Shikara is an invoicing tool with integrated e-invoicing validation, built in the UAE for UAE businesses. We take the format and the validation rules off your finance team’s plate, so issuing a compliant invoice feels like issuing an invoice.
Why we built it
The UAE’s e-invoicing mandate does not just change the file an invoice is sent as. It changes what an invoice has to contain, who checks it, and how it reaches the buyer. A document that would have been accepted as a PDF last year can now be rejected for a missing tax registration number, a VAT total that is off by a fil, or a code that is not on the right list.
Most finance teams do not want to learn a specification to send a bill. They want the invoice to go out, and to stay out. So we put the specification inside the product: every rule is checked before a document can be issued, and when something fails you get the field, the reason and the fix in plain language rather than a schema error.
Why “Shikara”?
We wanted a name you’d remember after closing the tab.
A shikara is a small wooden boat from Kashmir. It has nothing to do with tax, and that’s exactly why we picked it.
Compliance software doesn’t have to sound like compliance software, or feel like it either. Shikara has no forty-field forms, no error codes you need to look up, and no waiting until the invoice bounces to find out something was wrong. You get clean screens, plain language, and every rule checked while you work.
A different name, for software that’s meant to feel different.
What we do
Shikara covers the full billing document set — tax invoices, simplified and export invoices, credit notes and payments — validated against the PINT AE specification and produced as Peppol-ready documents for exchange through an accredited service provider. Customers, products, exchange rates and numbering sequences live in one place, so the same data you invoice with is the data your reports are built from.
The platform runs multiple organisations from one login, which matters in a market where a single group often holds a mainland entity and one or more free-zone companies.
How we work
We are a small, product-led team of engineers and tax-technology people. We track the FTA’s publications and the PINT AE releases directly, and we ship validation updates ahead of the dates they take effect — not after a customer’s invoice is rejected.
We are based in the UAE and support customers in the Gulf time zone, in English and Arabic.
Four commitments.
PINT AE, UBL 2.1 and Peppol are open standards. Your documents and your data stay exportable, always.
We would rather block a draft than let a rejection reach your customer. Nothing leaves the platform unchecked.
Rule identifiers are for auditors. Error messages are for people. We write ours for the person fixing the invoice.
We process your invoice data to run the service you paid for. We do not sell it, and we do not train on it.
A product of Avanor Consulting Services.
Shikara is built by Avanor Consulting Services, a UAE consultancy working in financial and accounting advisory, tax, audit and automation. The mandate reached our clients before it reached the market, which is why the validation rules in this platform are written by the people who file the returns.
Come and see it.
We’ll walk your team through set-up, validation and your first compliant invoice, using your own invoices.