Corporate Tax is a form of direct tax levied on the net income of corporations and other businesses. Corporate Tax is sometimes also referred to as “Corporate Income Tax” or “Business Profits Tax” in other jurisdictions.
Broadly, Corporate Tax applies to the following “Taxable Persons”: ● UAE companies and other juridical persons that are incorporated or effectively managed and controlled in the UAE; ● Natural persons (individuals) who conduct a Business or Business Activity in the UAE as specified in a Cabinet Decision to be issued in due course; and ● Non-resident juridical persons (foreign legal entities) that have a Permanent Establishment in the UAE (which is explained under Section 8). Juridical persons established in a UAE Free Zone are also within the scope of Corporate Tax as “Taxable Persons” and will need to comply with the requirements set out in the Corporate Tax Law. However, a Free Zone Person that meets the conditions to be considered a Qualifying Free Zone Person can benefit from a Corporate Tax rate of 0% on their Qualifying Income (the conditions are included in Section 14). Non-resident persons that do not have a Permanent Establishment in the UAE or that earn UAE sourced income that is not related to their Permanent Establishment may be subject to Withholding Tax (at the rate of 0%). Withholding tax is a form of Corporate Tax collected at source by the payer on behalf of the recipient of the income. Withholding taxes exist in many tax systems and typically apply to the cross-border payment of dividends, interest, royalties and other types of income.
During this month, FTA will also be running a series of online orientation sessions for EmaraTax users. There will be two sessions per day:
• 10 – 11 am providing you an opportunity to raise specific questions about using EmaraTax; • 3 – 4 pm focusing on specific aspects of EmaraTax, in particular password reset, returns submission and payments.
This You Tube recording has already been released and will soon also be available in Arabic.
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Power BI innovation never stops. For several years in a row now, it is positioned as a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, furthest to the right for completeness of vision and furthest up in the ability to execute within the Leaders’ quadrant.
The gaps are widening with interactive reports, paginated reports, datasets, dataflows, deployment pipelines, scorecards, dashboards, metrics, data alerts, and much more, and recently announced in public preview, self-service datamarts. No wonder, customers are adopting Power BI at an accelerated pace. Boost Office 365 productivity with Power BI integrated into PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams, connect to data anywhere with hundreds of built-in connectors, leverage industry-leading AI, go quickly from insight to action with the Microsoft Power Platform, and provide best-in-class mobile experiences with Power BI Mobile.
Reports can be mobile friendly, they can be paginated, and you can link into Azure Analysis Services.
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Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it will no longer be supporting SQL Server 2012
The product, on July 12, 2022, reached the end of its 10-year support model. It means that SQL Server 2012 will no longer get future security patches from Microsoft. The server continues to run under such circumstances, but organizations may be potentially exposed to future security troubles and they could get encumbered by the compliance implications of running unsupported software.
Organizations who need to stick with SQL Server products, have four options:
Organizations can upgrade to SQL Server 2019.
Organizations can continue to use SQL Server 2012 and get “Critical” security patches only via Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for up to three years.
Organizations can move their SQL Server 2012 workloads into Microsoft Azure virtual machines, where Microsoft provides the ESU patches at no cost.
Lastly, Microsoft advocates using Azure SQL Managed Instance, which is an Azure platform-as-a-service offering that promises high compatibility with on-premises SQL Server.
The Azure SQL Managed Instance option is similar to the Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance service, but the latter lets organizations continue to use their own infrastructure. The nuances between those two options are described in this Sept. 30, 2020 Microsoft Tech Community post.
While the ESU program offers a grace period of sorts for SQL Server 2012 users, its use with on-premises servers comes with licensing requirements. Organizations will need to have Software Assurance coverage, which is an annuity cost. However, they can only buy ESUs when they have an “Enterprise Agreement (EA), Enterprise Subscription Agreement (EAS), a Server & Cloud Enrollment (SCE) and Enrollment for Education Solutions (EES)” licensing, according to Microsoft’s end-of-support FAQ document.
The ESU program lets organization buy Critical security patches in one-year increments, for up to three years maximum. Microsoft hikes the ESU price each year by 25 percent of the base price of SQL Server 2012 license, according to the following formula:
Year 1: Approximately 75% of full license price
Year 2: Approximately 100% of full license price
Year 3: Approximately 125% of full license price
Those incremental fees no doubt are designed to prod organizations into moving their SQL Server 2012 workloads into Azure virtual machines, where Microsoft provides ESU patching for free.
For organizations making the move to cloud services, Microsoft’s Azure Migration and Modernization Program offers either Microsoft ,or partner support for moves to Azure services. This program is billed as being available to organizations of all sizes, and bearing “no additional cost” for Azure customers, per its landing page.
Microsoft has recently beefed up the funding for the Azure Migration and Modernization Program.
“We’re now investing significantly more to support your largest Windows Server and SQL Server migration and modernization projects, up to 2.5 times more than previous investments, based on project eligibility,” the announcement indicated. “This investment will help with your migration in two ways: partner assistance with planning and moving your workloads, and Azure credits that offset transition costs during your move to Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.”
The announcement also warned that Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will be reaching their end-of-support phases “next year on October 10, 2023.”
Microsoft plans to offer its ESU patch program and its Modernization migration support program for those servers as well.
Next year, in April, many of Microsoft’s 2013-branded application servers will also fal out of support
Note: Before you upgrade SQL, check the compatibility of the software that runs on it with the new version of SQL – you may be faced with the need to also update those systems to later versions for example older versions of Dynamics Ax,
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A packed day at the Sofitel in London with Infor SunSystems partners from 14 different countries in attendance. Infor has recently set up an internal dedicated IBU for Sunsystems and the management team is moving the solution forwardly rapidly.
While Infor cloud is at the heart of many developments in response to customer demand, there is still an on-premise option that is also being enhanced at the next release.
Expect Infor cloud 12 GA release around October this year.
For smaller customers we expect considerable license simplification for the cloud to be introduced next year.
We expect customer events for Infor SunSystems later this year.
Sunsystems powerful financial features and the journey to Infor Cloud is summarised below:
Secure business continuity for the office of the CFO in the cloud
When you move to the Infor Cloud, your organization will benefit from continuous technology enhancements without disruption, replace legacy customizations with Infor’s deep industry functionality, gain world-class security, improve uptime and reduce risk.
Synergy Software Systems has been an Infor partner since its inception 20 years ago a Sun Systems partner for almost 30 years.
To learn more about SunSystems on-premise, or on cloud call us 00971 4 3365589
According to Microsoft commissioned research by Forrester in November 2020, 61 percent of businesses expect more than half of their sales to come from digital commerce over the next two years.
More than 50 percent of businesses report that their supply chains are unprepared to accommodate a growth in digital commerce.
In a recent McKinsey survey of 60 senior supply-chain executives, from across industries and geographies, 85 percent of respondents reported inefficient digital technologies to address logistic disruptions, shortages of parts and materials, and sudden swings in demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management enables organizations to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rule-based system using real-time omnichannel inventory data, AI, and machine learning.
Adapt quickly to meet future order volumes and fulfillment complexities by supporting new order intake, fulfillment, and delivery partners with pre-built connectors and support contemporary collection methods like buying online for in-store or curbside pickup. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, is a solution that enables agile businesses with easy-to-deploy out-of-the-box connectors within a low-code or no-code environment.
Intelligent Order Management offers pre-built connectors for order intake sources to help businesses to accept orders from anywhere for example:
Orderful a cloud-based electronic data interchange (EDI) platform
BigCommerce a cloud-based e-commerce SaaS platform.
ShipStation is a web-based e-commerce shipping platform for merchants to quickly generate shipping labels for their online orders. By integrating ShipStation with the Intelligent Order Management platform, users can bring all their carriers and order sources together within one unified solution.
Intelligent Order Management users can also use pre-built partner connectors connect to integrate to:
Avalara, an automated tax compliance solution that determines order tax rates based on geolocation and product classification,
Flexe, a cloud-based platform that unifies warehouse sourcing and streamlines material handling operations.
Microsoft’s Intelligent Order Management provides a foundation for businesses to build agility and resiliency into their order management processes and to free themselves from legacy, inefficient technologies.
With internal to external ID transformation, users use different mappings with different providers. For example, a different names for the same product or SKU from an e-commerce system, such as BigCommerce, to Intelligent Order Management. This type of internal to external ID mapping is critical when Intelligent Order Management is used in complex order environments where data is communicated between many internal and external systems.
There are localized Business Event definitions and Provider definition metadata for the following languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.
An enriched Power BI architecture includes a set of dashboards embedded into the user interface. The Power BI dashboards provide longer-range insights into the order and fulfillment data..
Improve order accuracy with fulfillment insights
A recent “final mile” survey by Gartner®, found that only 18 percent of organizations report fulfillment accuracy rates of 95 percent or better.
What is the cost in extra administration of processing an order and shipment twice?
What are the top and bottom line impacts of losing 5% or more of sales already won?
Intelligent Order Management with the new Order insights dashboard can help you to improve this key performance indicator.
To find out more contact: Synergy Software Systems: 0097143365589
IFRS 17 is the newest IFRS standard for insurance contracts and replaces IFRS 4 on January 1st 2022. Mainly to make the financial statement easier to compare across insurance companies and among industries
It states which insurance contracts items should by on the balance and the profit and loss account of an insurance company, how to measure these items and how to present and disclose this information.
This is a big change for insurance companies because data administration, financial presentation and actuarial calculations will need to change!
IFRS 9 explains the classification and the measurement of financial instruments. Hence IFRS 9 helps to improve the information disclosure around financial instrument. Many perceive the information disclosure around financial instruments during the financial crisis as inaccurate for example impairments on financial instruments were taken too late and the amounts were too little. IFRS 9 makes the classification of each financial instrument more logical and principle based. There are two questions which need to be answered for the classification: • Why is the company holding the asset; just for collecting the cash flows from the underlying asset, or is the asset also held for trading? • What kind of asset is the financial asset? Is it a derivative, an equity or a debt instrument? With the SPPI (solely payment of principal and interest) model it can be tested whether an instrument is really a debt instrument. The classification determines: • which accounting principle is used; • should the instrument be measured at fair value or at amortized cost • and whether earnings and losses should go through the profit and loss account or through the OCI (other comprehensive income) account. IFRS 9 also includes a more dynamic credit loss model instructing when an insurer should take an impairment on financial assets. The model is forward looking thereby also expected future losses should be taken into account with the impairment. IFRS 9 also makes hedge accounting possibilities more rule based, thereby being in line with how risks are managed within insurers.
Why are IFRS 9 and IFRS 17 implemented together? • The insurance liability (IFRS 17) is always closely connected to the financial instruments (IFRS 9) within insurers. • When a client buys an insurance, the insurance liability is created and with the paid premiums are financial instruments bought. • Insurers want to reduce the volatility in their earnings and there are some choices within IFRS 9 and IFRS 17 which they can make which can impact the volatility. • Under IFRS 17 insurers can decide whether results of changing financial risk assumption go through OCI or through the profit and loss account. • Under IFRS 9 insurers can decide whether changes in equity will go through profit and loss or through OCI. Both standards will impact earning volatility and hence balance sheet management choices are connected. Consequently, the IFRS board decided it is better that insurers are granted the option to implement both standards together.
Likely impacts • New concepts and terms are introduced. for example components like unbiased Cash Flows, Risk Adjustment, Discount Rate and CSM • The standards will have an impact on the presented numbers. Under IFRS 17 the insurance liability needs to be based on updated assumptions which is currently not the case with IFRS 4. • Faster disclosure is needed, which needs faster processes within the organization • Insurance liability needs to be specified in a different way, the importance of gross written premiums disappears, while equity will be impacted. • Risk engines are needed to calculate the CSM and cope with all the different groups • The general ledger system will change as new measurements are introduced • Big impact on presentation of the balance and P&L • More data is needed. with finer granularity and with more history, which challenges internal data quality and consistency and IT performance. • Reporting timelines are also shortened. both challenging the systems but also the cooperation between different departments. • Staff training will be needed.
To find out more about the requirements contact us or your auditors. To update your financial software or to acquire software to support IFRS 17 please call Synergy Software Systems on 009714 3365589
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Are you responsible for a busy SQL server, for example, the Finance Department’s systems, documentation management, CRM, BI, or a Web Server; perhaps a busy file and print server, or something else entirely.
Were you responsible for installing the application running the workload for your company? Is the workload business critical, i.e. TOO BIG TO FAIL?
Do users, or even worse, customers, complain about performance?
If you are responsible to keep the workloads running in your organization that would benefit from additional performance, please read on – even if you don’t consider yourself a “Techie”.
Windows and VMs are both factors of high latency that impacts performance.
Variables Affecting the Performance of the Applications
There are many variables that affect the performance of those applications. The slowest, i.e. the most restrictive of these is the “Bottleneck”. Think of water being poured from a bottle. The water can only flow as fast as the neck of the bottle, the ‘slowest’ part of the bottle.
In a computer hardware the bottleneck will almost always fit into one of the following categories:
CPU
DISK
MEMORY
NETWORK
With Windows, it is usually very easy to find out which one the bottleneck is in, and here is how to do it (like an IT Engineer):
To open Resource Monitor – click the Start menu, and type “resource monitor”, and press Enter. Microsoft includes this as part of the Windows operating system and it is already installed.
Notice the graphs in the right-hand pane. When your computer is running at peak load, or users are complaining about performance, which of the graphs are ‘maxing out’? This is a great indicator of where your workload’s bottleneck is to be found.
What You Can Do to Improve Application Performance
Once you have identified your bottleneck – the slowest part of your ‘compute environment’ then, what can you do to improve it?
The traditional approach to solving computer performance issues is to throw bigger and more powerful hardware at the solution like an extra disk or a new laptop, or putting more RAM into your workstation, or on the more extreme end, buying new servers or expensive storage solutions.
How do you decide when it is appropriate to spend money on new or additional hardware, and when it isn’t. Well the obvious answer is; ‘when you can get the performance that you need’, with the existing hardware infrastructure that you have already bought.
You don’t replace your car, just because it needs a service or tuning?
Let’s take disk speed as an example. Look at the response time column in Resource Monitor. Open the monitor to full screen or large enough to see the data. On the Overview tab, open the Disk Activity section so that you can see the Response Time column.
Do it now on the computer you’re using to read this. (You didn’t close Resource Monitor yet, did you?) This shows the Disk Response Time, or , how long is the storage taking to read and write data? Of course, a slower disk speed = a slower performance, but what is considered a good disk speed or a bad speed?
“Response Time (ms). Disk response time in milliseconds. For this metric, a lower number is definitely better; in general, anything less than 10 ms is considered good performance. If you occasionally go beyond 10 ms, you should be okay, but if the system is consistently waiting more than 20 ms for response from the storage, then you may have a problem that needs attention, and it’s likely that users will notice performance degradation. At 50 ms and greater, the problem is serious.”
I hope when you check on your computer, the Disk Response Time is below 20 milliseconds. What about those other workloads that you were thinking about earlier. What’s the Disk Response Times on that busy SQL server, the CRM or BI platform, or those Windows servers that the users complain about?
Your Two Options
When the Disk Response Times are often higher than 20 milliseconds, and you need to improve the application performance, then it’s choice time and there are two main options:
Storage workload reduction software like DymaxIO™ fast data (Diskeeper®, SSDkeeper®, and V-locity® are now new DymaxIO fast data software). This tool will reduce Disk Storage Times by allowing much e of the data that your applications need to read, to come from a RAM cache, rather than be read slower disk storage. RAM is much faster than the media in your disk storage.
Contact us to trial this. You don’t even need to reboot.
If you have tried the DymaxIO software, and you still need faster disk access, then, it’s time to start getting quotations for new hardware. It does make sense though, to take a couple of minutes to install DymaxIO first, to see if that can be avoided. The software solution to remove storage inefficiencies is typically a much more cost-effective solution than having to buy hardware! A software solution to a software problem.
Improve Your Application Performance by Decreasing Disk Latency like an IT Engineer – call us to learn more 0097143365589
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We’re excited to announce the ‘February 2021’ release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform. In this release, there are a number of new Snap Packs: for Marketo and Hubspot. for Marketing Automation, for Microsoft Teams and Power BI for team communication and analytics rly, and OpenAPI to connect to any OpenAPI compliant endpoints.
There is also support for Azure Synapse analytics to our ELT capability. Platform enhancements include :
higher productivity through expanded Universal search,
platform notifications to Slack,
better reliability through Snaplex level scheduling, and more.
Hassle-free connectivity with NEW Snap Packs
New Snap Packs provide out-of-the-box connectivity to key enterprise endpoints. For example the new Marketo and Hubspot Snap Packs allow you to connect seamlessly to these marketing automation systems. Easily manage marketing assets/campaigns or leads that enter your marketing funnel. While HubSpot Snap Pack supports CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, the Marketo Snap Pack allows you to do bulk operations on leads.
With these Snap Packs, quickly sync your assets and leads data across Marketing, Sales, and other functional areas and easily connect to event/survey applications such as Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, or to Demand Generation tools such as Google Ads, Linkedin, and Analytics endpoints such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.
The Microsoft Power BI Snap Pack is also new and allows you to connect your Power BI instance to hundreds of data sources to bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports. Visualize your data and share insights across teams or embed these in your app or website. The Snap Pack helps you to post, push datasets, read, and edit so that you can easily query data, create/bind entities, import files, and update entities.
For an organization that has a heavy investment in the Microsoft ecosystem, the next Snap Pack the new Microsoft Teams Snap Pack allows you to easily integrate your Microsoft Teams into your enterprise workflows for customers, employees, and teams. This Snap Pack supports accounts such as OAuth2 User, Application, and Dynamic accounts to adhere to your enterprise security standards. Use it to send messages, perform channel operations, and perform team operations. .
Another key new Snap Pack with this release is the OpenAPI Snap Pack. Most API endpoints today adhere to the OpenAPI specification version 2 or 3. Leverage this Snap Pack to connect to any API endpoint with the published OpenAPI specification so that users can get all the needed documentation while they build their automated workflows. More efficiently connect to any generic endpoint without the need for specific Snaps.
Improved connectivity with other Snap Pack enhancements
Google Sheets Snap Pack now supports JSON based version 4 of the API rather than XML based version 3
Kafka Snap Pack updates now support reading/writing record headers and timestamps, provide option to choose one output document per batch. The later feature allows systems that don’t natively support streaming data to effectively work with Kafka messages by batching them together.
Amazon Redshift and Amazon SQS Snap Packs provide cross-account IAM support that allows organizations to trust and allocate roles with specific access privileges to specific groups or users.
Pushdown to any cloud data warehouse including Azure Synapse
Over previous releases, Snaplogic has introduced ELT support for Snowflake, Redshift cloud data warehouses so that you can do both ETL and ELT on a single platform. The ELT support is extended to Azure Synapse with this release. With ELT for Azure Synapse, you can accelerate data loading into Azure Synapse to provide ultimate flexibility to transform data by use of all computing resources across SnapLogic and Azure Synpase, thus reducing TCO and enabling a faster time-to-value.
With the SnapLogic platform yextract data from SaaS applications and databases with a vast number of Snaps. Once the data is in the staging area in Azure Cloud Storage, visually define data transformations, no need to write SQL. These visual transformations are converted into SQL statements and pushed to Azure Synapse for execution.
New features added to SnapLogic ELT make it easy to discover schema and SQL functions in the target cloud data warehouse. The platform provides suggestions for column names during LOAD, INSERT SELECT or MERGE INTO operations. The platform also provides SQL function suggestions when working with your target cloud data warehouse. To deal with large number of SQL functions various cloud data warehouses support, are grouped into different categories to simplify discovery.
Better Ease of Use and improved resiliency with the Platform Updates
The SnapLogic Intelligent Integration platform continues to evolve to make it easy for integration developers, whether they are technical or non-technical, to build and monitor integrations.
Universal Search, as the name suggests helps you search everything related to SnapLogic, all from a single search box. With the February release, it now performs pipeline searches in addition to the searches in Community, Configured Snaps and Documentation. This is not just a simple text based search. The Iris AI integration assistant provides more relevant search results across generic content (in community and documentation) and specific content from your org (such as pipelines or configured Snaps that you have access to). T
Figure 1: Universal search now supports pipeline searches
To efficiently monitor your integrations use the platform notifications to Slack. Users then get notified via Slack for any notifications from SnapLogic platform such as Daily API Usage, Snaplex Congestion, CPU usage, user activity, in addition to email notifications. Send notifications either on Slack Channels or directly to users.
Figure 2: Configuring Notifications to Slack
Enable Snaplex levels scheduling for all the scheduled tasks. This update reduces the time difference between the scheduled time of task execution and the actual time of task execution. With this update, your scheduled tasks won’t be affected by network disruption of the control plane helping your reliably deliver data that advances business processes and delivers insights.
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The performance degradation of applications running on Windows, and VMs is getting inherently worse. This includes latency issues, queries or reports timing out, crashes, missed SLAs, back office batch jobs bleeding over into production hours, and the litany of “shadow IT” problems that wreak havoc.
Even after migrating to a brand-new flash array, performance problems return because the root source of the problem still exists. The fact is, 30-40% of performance is being robbed by small, fractured, random I/O being generated due to operating system I/O inefficiencies. This is a software problem that is solved by our software.
DymaxIO™ fast data software will quickly:
Increase performance automatically – no tuning required. Simply install and watch performance problems disappear.
Optimizes writes so maximum payload is carried with every I/O operation.
Speed up I/O intensive applications like MS-SQL/Oracle, CRM, ERP, File Servers, Imaging, Web Servers, Backups, VDI.
Install our software on your most troublesome servers and see 30-50% or more of the noisy, garbage I/O offloaded and performance dramatically improved.
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There ahs been much talk of both devops and citizen developers.
While these new paradigms are welcome and bring many benefits that does not mean that they replace other proven systems of software development.
There are reason why some consultancies quote significantly lower times to develop than other- usually tis lack of knowledge/awareness of what needs to be considered or they deliberately cut corners in areas like security, validation, documentation, testing, and so on.
