Records URA expects for cash and mobile money sales
The five-year record rule, what an EFRIS e-receipt must carry, the 1 July 2026 penalty changes and a filing routine for cash, MoMo and credit sales.
The question a URA officer asks is never "did you take mobile money?" It is "show me the records for that period". The law on what you must keep is the same whether a sale was paid in notes, by MoMo or on credit, but each tender leaves a different trail and a small business has to make sure all three are filed. Here is the rule, the receipt, the penalties that changed on 1 July 2026, and a routine.
The five-year rule
The Tax Procedures Code Act requires every taxpayer to maintain records, in English and including records in electronic format, that are needed to determine their tax liability, to keep them so that the liability can be readily ascertained, and to retain them for five years after the end of the tax period they relate to. Failing to maintain proper records is both a penal tax matter and an offence under the Act.
The ordinary year of income runs from 1 July to 30 June, so a receipt issued in October 2026 belongs to the 2026/27 year and must be kept until mid 2032. URA's assessment window is three years in law, but as PwC notes, because the Act sets a five-year retention period a five-year review is applied in practice. Keep five.
What the receipt itself must be
For businesses within EFRIS, the Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution, the record of a sale is the fiscal document. URA's EFRIS page explains that the system generates e-invoices, e-receipts, e-credit notes and e-debit notes, each carrying a Fiscal Document Number (FDN), a verification code and a QR code, with transaction data shared with URA in real time. An e-invoice is issued only by a VAT-registered person; an e-receipt is issued by a taxpayer who is not VAT registered. EFRIS is mandatory for all VAT-registered businesses and for businesses in twelve designated sectors whether VAT registered or not, and other taxpayers may use it voluntarily.
Two practical points follow. First, the fiscal receipt is the sales record for every tender: a MoMo sale without an FDN is as incomplete as a cash sale without one. Second, URA says e-receipts can be issued offline for up to five days on all platforms except the web portal, so a power cut or a dropped connection is not an excuse for an unreceipted day, provided your till queues and syncs.
Penalties changed on 1 July 2026
The 2026 tax amendment Acts, assented to on 18 May 2026 and effective from 1 July 2026, reshaped the penalties around fiscal receipting. The penal tax for failing to issue an e-invoice or e-receipt, or for tampering with a fiscal device, is now double the tax due or ten currency points (UGX 200,000), whichever is higher, replacing the previous fixed floor of UGX 6 million. The same Acts raised the annual VAT registration threshold from UGX 150 million to UGX 300 million and lowered the e-receipt refund scheme's eligibility threshold from UGX 5 million to UGX 2 million. The headline for a small trader: the entry-level penalty is lower, but it now scales with the tax you failed to receipt, so the habit matters more than the floor.
Three tenders, three trails
Cash leaves the thinnest trail, so it needs the most paper: the fiscal receipt, the shift sheet with float, drops and count, and the bank deposit slip that shows where the cash went.
Mobile money leaves an operator record. File the monthly merchant statement with the sales report and a note of the differences. The statement proves the money arrived; the receipts prove what it was for.
Credit sales leave an invoice and, later, a payment. The sale is recorded and receipted when the goods are supplied, not when the customer pays, and the customer's statement of account links the two.
A filing routine that survives an audit
- Every sale gets a fiscal receipt from the till, whatever the tender, including offline sales that sync later.
- Every day, the shift sheet and the till's sales-by-tender report are filed together.
- Every month, the operator statements and the bank statement are filed with the reconciliation that ties them to the sales report.
- Every report is exported and backed up in a format that can be opened in five years. Spreadsheet exports in a dated folder meet that test; a photograph of a screen does not.
- Nothing is deleted before five years after the end of the year of income, and nothing relating to an open query is deleted at all.
Why this is good for you, not just for URA
A business that can produce, for any month, its receipts, its tenders and the statements that prove the money arrived is a business that knows its own margin, catches theft early and can show a bank or an investor exactly what it does. The record rule is a tax obligation. Meeting it is also simply how a well-run shop works.
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