You are roughly three months out. The lease is signed or close to it, the paperwork is somewhere in the Department of Economy and Tourism, and you have not chosen a POS. That is fine — you are not late. But the technology work does have an order, and most of it is gated on things you do not control yet.
This is that order, week by week, mapped against the licensing window you are actually sitting in. The pillar guide covers the decisions themselves; this page is the schedule.
What the 90 days assume
There is no official published timeline for opening a restaurant in Dubai, so be careful with anyone who gives you a confident number. One 2026 setup consultancy puts a realistic path at 90 days for a fast-casual dry concept and four to six months as the median for a 60-seat full-service restaurant. Treat that as an experienced estimate, not a schedule you can hold anyone to.
Two tracks run in parallel and neither waits for the other. The commercial track is DET: identify the activity, choose the legal form, register the trade name, obtain initial approval, sign the MOA, secure premises, collect additional approvals, pay and collect the licence.
Source: u.ae — Steps to start a business on the mainland
The food-safety track is Dubai Municipality, which runs a distinct layout assessment for food establishment licensing service and a separate permit request for food activities. Your kitchen drawings go in early because that assessment sits on the critical path, not beside it.
The most common 90-day mistake has nothing to do with technology. It is running the DET licence and the Municipality food permit sequentially — finishing one, then starting the other. They are separate authorities with separate queues. Run them at the same time and you get weeks back for free.
The schedule
| Week | Licensing milestone | Technology task | Blocked by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13-12 | Trade name, initial approval, activity code; kitchen layout submitted to DM | Network and power plan. Where every terminal, printer, router and card machine sits. | Nothing. Start here. |
| 11-10 | Ejari, fit-out begins, food safety programme drafted | Shortlist three POS vendors. Request written quotes covering three years, not one month. | Nothing |
| 9-8 | Municipality design approval, civil defence clearance | Decide printed tickets or kitchen screens. Confirm station layout with your head chef. | Network plan |
| 7-6 | Trade licence issued | Sign the POS contract. Start the merchant account application the same day. | Trade licence |
| 5-4 | VAT registration submitted; PIC certified; Foodwatch registration | Build the menu — items, prices, modifiers, Arabic. Start aggregator onboarding. | Final menu from the kitchen |
| 3 | Food permit inspection; staff health cards | Configure TRN and receipt templates. Wire and test printer routing on real hardware. | TRN issued |
| 2 | Staff onboarding, food handler training | Train every server on the live system. Print and mount QR codes if you are using them. | Menu live |
| 1 | Final inspection | Full dry-run service, then friends-and-family soft opening. Fix what breaks. | Everything above |
| Opening | - | Nobody configures anything today. | - |
Weeks 13-10: the decisions that live inside walls
Cabling is the only technology decision on this list that is genuinely expensive to reverse, because it gets buried. Before the electrician starts, mark on the floor plan where every till, kitchen printer, screen, router and card terminal will physically live, and pull wired ethernet to all of them. Run a second internet line from a different provider, or at absolute minimum a 5G router on automatic failover. Everything else in this guide assumes that exists.
While the walls are open, also shortlist POS vendors. Three is enough. Ask each for a written quote and read past the monthly licence fee — the number that decides this is the three-year total including hardware, per-terminal charges, payment processing rates, integration fees, and what happens to your data if you leave. Our companion guide on what a POS actually costs in the UAE breaks down the bands.
You are not signing anything yet. There is no permit that asks which POS you use — that is the whole argument of do you need a POS to open in Dubai — so refusing to be rushed in week 12 costs you nothing.
Weeks 9-6: signing, and the compliance clock
Printed tickets or kitchen screens is a real fork, and it needs to be settled before menu build because routing rules are configured per item. Changing it afterwards means rebuilding the menu.
Sign the POS when the trade licence lands. Two clocks start on that same day and both have penalties attached:
| Obligation | Trigger | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate tax registration — within 3 months of incorporation | Juridical persons incorporated on or after 1 March 2024 | FTA |
| VAT registration — mandatory | Taxable supplies over AED 375,000 in the previous 12 months, or expected to exceed within the next 30 days | FTA |
| VAT registration — voluntary | Over AED 187,500 | FTA |
Most restaurants clear AED 375,000 within months of opening, so assume VAT registration is coming and start it early rather than discovering the threshold in arrears.
Start the merchant account application the day the licence is issued. It depends on a licence you did not have until now, and it consistently takes longer than sales teams suggest.
Weeks 5-3: the TRN dependency
This is the hard link in the chain. Your Tax Registration Number has to appear on every tax invoice you issue, and the TRN comes from VAT registration, which comes from the licence. You cannot finish a compliant receipt template before it exists — but you can build absolutely everything else, so do.
Menu build is the biggest single block of work in the 90 days and it is always under-booked. Items, prices, modifiers, allergens, printer routing per item, and the Arabic side. Arabic is not a translation file: it is right-to-left, which means the layout mirrors, not just the strings. Bilingual menus in the UAE covers what that actually requires.
The AED 10,000 figure is widely misread. It is not a ceiling on consumer receipts. A simplified tax invoice may be issued to any recipient who is not VAT-registered, with no value limit at all. The AED 10,000 limit applies only where the recipient is VAT-registered. And a simplified invoice still has to carry the words “Tax Invoice” and your TRN as supplier — it drops the buyer’s details, not yours. So a walk-in diner gets a simplified receipt at any value; a VAT-registered corporate customer recovering input tax on an AED 12,000 event bill needs a full tax invoice with their TRN on it. Your system must produce both.
Source: VAT Executive Regulation, Article 59 · timing: a full tax invoice is due within 14 days of the date of supply, but Article 59(13) requires a simplified invoice — the receipt you hand a diner — to be issued on the date of supply. Full detail in VAT, TRN and invoicing for UAE restaurants
Two compliance items also land here and both need a named human, not a system. The Dubai Food Code requires that all food establishments shall employ at least one full-time, on-site Person in Charge, and your food safety programme must be retained in written form at the establishment, reviewed at least annually, and audited by a third-party food safety auditor approved by Dubai Municipality. Dubai Municipality has also run a Food Watch programme for food establishments, and consultancies describe registration on it as mandatory for food businesses. Its former standalone address no longer resolves, so confirm both your status and the current portal with the Municipality's Food Safety Department directly rather than assuming.
If QR ordering is part of your concept, this is the window to test it — codes printed, table numbers mapped, one real table walked end to end. See setting up QR ordering.
Weeks 2-1: the part that gets cut
Training and the dry run are the first things sacrificed when the fit-out overruns, and they are the two that decide whether opening night is survivable. Book a full mock service: real tickets, real printers, real card terminal, real splits, staff who have never touched the system. Then a friends-and-family soft opening in front of people who will forgive you.
Anything still being configured in the final week will be configured wrong.
Where Shareabill fits, and where it does not
If you get to week 7 and want a connected system, Shareabill covers QR ordering, bill splitting by item, percentage or equal share, POS and terminal payments, delivery and third-party orders, takeaway, inventory, loyalty and AR menus. The guest apps run in nine languages with full right-to-left layout for Arabic rather than mirrored text in a left-to-right shell, and 5% VAT is handled throughout. Receipts print the words “TAX INVOICE” and the venue’s TRN on both the thermal and PDF outputs by default, configurable per location. We do not claim FTA certification, because the FTA does not certify POS systems.
Shareabill has no offline mode. It is cloud and socket based; if the venue loses internet, ordering and payment stop until it comes back. That is why week 13 on this list is about cabling and a failover line. If your site cannot get a reliable connection — a basement unit on a single copper line, a beach club, a food truck — buy a traditional POS with local offline caching instead. That is the right answer for those venues and we would rather say it now than during your first Friday service.
Nothing here is tax or legal advice, and timelines quoted from consultancies are estimates rather than published schedules. Check the primary sources linked above and take professional advice before committing capital.