The Kenya Revenue Authority told businesses today that they must keep accurate and up to date stock records while using TIMS and eTIMS. In a public notice signed by the Commissioner for Micro and Small Taxpayers, KRA said those records should account for goods as they move through a business: stock purchased or received, sold, transferred, returned, adjusted or otherwise disposed of.
KRA is implementing a stock management functionality for electronic invoicing, and it says it will hold consultative forums with the business community and other stakeholders first. The forums are expected to commence in September 2026. The notice gives no dates, no venues, and no deadline for compliance. It points businesses to the KRA Contact Centre on 020 4 999 999 or 0711 099 999, or to callcentre@kra.go.ke and stakeholder.engagement@kra.go.ke.
What the two systems are
TIMS is the older regime, built around electronic tax registers that transmit invoice data to KRA. eTIMS is the software successor, launched in 2023, and it comes in several formats: a browser portal, a downloadable client for businesses with multiple tills and branches, an eTIMS Lite web version on eCitizen, a mobile app, a USSD version on *222# for sole proprietors, and direct system to system integration for companies with their own invoicing software.
Every person carrying on business in Kenya has to issue electronic tax invoices unless exempted under section 23A of the Tax Procedures Act. As of 30 June 2026, 750,915 taxpayers had onboarded onto eTIMS. KRA collected KES 2.844 trillion in the financial year ending that month, up 10.6%.
This is not a new rule
The stock obligation already exists in law. Regulation 4(3)(c) of the Tax Procedures (Electronic Tax Invoice) Regulations, 2024, Legal Notice 64 of 2024, which commenced on 28 March 2024, requires the user of a system to “maintain the stock in and stock out records in the system”, to record each local purchase and import, and to notify the Commissioner in writing of current stock 30 days before closing a business. KRA’s own eTIMS documentation has described a stock management module since launch, saying it “assists taxpayers maintain their own inventory”.
So the requirement has been sitting in the regulations for two and a half years with patchy enforcement. What the September notice signals is that KRA now intends to make the stock module an operating part of the invoicing system rather than an optional feature most traders ignore.
The reason is simple: an invoice on its own tells KRA what you say you sold. Stock movement data tells KRA what you bought and what left the shelf.
What else KRA has tightened this year
Since 1st January 2026, expenses not backed by a valid eTIMS invoice can be disallowed. Which is a trap we flagged when the tax amnesty opened in July. On 31 August 2026, KRA and the National Treasury connected eTIMS to IFMIS, so a government supplier whose invoice does not match its eTIMS record can have its payment held. And we have written before about KRA tying eTIMS to M-Pesa to create tax events at the moment of payment. Adan Mohamed, appointed Commissioner General in May 2026, was hired on an explicitly technology-led brief.
The open question is who carries the cost. A supermarket with a point of sale system already tracks inventory and can push it into eTIMS. A hardware shop recording sales on *222# does not have an inventory system at all, and daily stock capture for a few hundred SKUs is a job someone has to do. The notice does not say whether eTIMS Lite users will be held to the same standard as eTIMS Client users, and that is the single most important thing for the forums to settle.
Reliability matters too. eTIMS went down for days in July 2026 after a 20 hour maintenance window overran and ran into the weekend. Thousands of businesses could not invoice while it was down. Stock records that must be live create a bigger reconciliation problem when the system is not.
The penalties for poor records are already heavy. Businesses must keep records for five years, and failure can attract fines of up to KES 2 million for a company, on top of estimated assessments and agency notices on bank accounts.
If you sell goods, the thing to do before the forums is check whether your current stock records could survive being read against your eTIMS sales for the last quarter. That reconciliation is the one KRA is about to be able to run automatically.
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