eTIMS for salons in Kenya

Service-only billing is the simple case

A standard salon transaction is a service (a manicure, a cut, a treatment) paid for at the till in cash or M-Pesa, with no buyer PIN required. The eTIMS invoice carries the service description, the rate (most personal services are standard-rated), the amount and the KRA-issued control number and QR code. The customer can take a printed slip or a WhatsApp link.

At low volume, eTIMS Lite on a phone is a fair fit. The therapist or owner enters the service and price into the app at checkout, transmits, and shares the invoice. The workflow is slow compared to a real POS but acceptable for a salon doing a dozen services a day.

Retail products alongside services

Many salons resell hair products, treatments, or accessories. The moment you stock retail SKUs, you need a product file with stable codes and prices, which moves you beyond what eTIMS Lite handles efficiently.

For mixed service-and-retail salons, the cleanest setup is a small POS that handles both: services with a fixed price, products with a barcode and stock count, and a single transmitted eTIMS invoice per closed sale. Daily reconciliation gets much easier too, because the till count matches transmitted invoices automatically.

Corporate accounts and B2B treatments

Salons that run corporate wellness contracts (a company paying for staff treatments) or that bill insurers (some medical-spa services) are B2B in those transactions. The buyer is the corporate or the insurer; the invoice needs the buyer's KRA PIN.

Salons commonly miss this because the majority of their book is walk-in B2C. The fix is to set up a buyer profile per corporate account so the PIN defaults onto invoices for that buyer automatically.

Cash management and tips

Cash-heavy operation is the norm in a salon. The eTIMS step does not care about the payment channel; it cares about the invoice. But the salon's own reconciliation needs to match the cash drawer and the M-Pesa till against transmitted invoices each evening. Salons that handle this manually commonly find gaps of a few percent that turn out to be missed invoices over time.

Tips, where they go directly to the staff member, are not part of the salon's revenue and do not need an eTIMS invoice. Tips routed through the salon's till and then disbursed to staff are part of the salon's revenue and need an invoice with the rest of the service.

Why low-volume salons should still register

A small salon below the VAT registration threshold might assume eTIMS does not apply. It does. The regulations cover every person carrying on business, regardless of VAT status, with a narrow list of exempt supplies (Legal Notice No. 64 of 2024). Personal services are not on the exempt list.

Failing to issue a compliant invoice exposes the salon to a penalty of up to KES 1 million or 10% of the tax involved, whichever is higher. For a single salon owner, even a fraction of that on a year of non-compliance is a closure-level number.

Setting up eTIMS in a salon in four steps

1. Register on the right channel. Tiny service-only salon: eTIMS Lite is fine. Mixed service-and-retail or corporate accounts: OSCU through a POS integrator.
2. Set up corporate buyer profiles. For each corporate wellness or insurer account, capture the buyer PIN once. The PIN defaults onto invoices for that buyer.
3. Train the team on B2B vs B2C. A walk-in is B2C. A treatment billed to a company is B2B and needs the company PIN. The distinction has to be in the cashier's head.
4. Reconcile cash and M-Pesa daily. Cash drawer plus M-Pesa till settlement equals transmitted eTIMS total. Track any gap immediately.

How Veira handles this

For salons that have outgrown eTIMS Lite, Veira runs a mixed service-and-retail POS with corporate buyer profiles, barcode-scanned retail products, M-Pesa reconciliation and automatic eTIMS transmission. The therapist closes the sale once and the compliance happens inside it.