PRA E-IMS Punjab: who must comply

Sales tax on services in Pakistan is a provincial subject. The Punjab Revenue Authority administers it in Punjab under the Punjab Sales Tax on Services Act 2012, and the rules under that Act are made under its section 76. E-IMS — the Electronic Invoice Monitoring System — is PRA's system for watching those services being invoiced.

That single sentence resolves most of the confusion. FBR digital invoicing and PRA E-IMS are not two names for one obligation, two phases of one rollout, or a federal system with a provincial front end. They are different systems, run by different authorities, under different statutes, with different servers, different payload formats and different numbers coming back. Meeting one has no effect on the other.

The practical consequence is unglamorous and expensive: a business whose supplies straddle both can end up transmitting the same transaction twice, to two places, in two formats, and printing two sets of identifiers. That is a real operating cost, and it is worth knowing about before a POS contract is signed rather than after.

Punjab's headline sales tax rate on services is 16%, the same as Islamabad. Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan are at 15%. Punjab restaurants are reported to be at a reduced rate — treat that as approximate and get the figure that applies to your own category confirmed, because the rate on a restaurant bill is one of the few things a customer will notice and dispute.

The categories named in the current enforcement are restaurants, hotels, coffee shops and marriage halls. Those four are the ones covered by the 10 August 2026 ban on handwritten receipts.

Salons and beauty parlours are worth a separate paragraph, because they are the category most often mis-stated. Beauty parlours do appear on a published list of notified categories — but that list belongs to FBR's draft SRO 288(I)/2026, a federal income tax instrument that is not in force, and not to the PRA enforcement described here. Do not read the SRO 288 category list as a PRA scope list.

The threshold is expressed as annual income rather than turnover or taxable supplies. Those are not the same measure, and for a restaurant they can differ substantially. Three questions follow, and a multi-site operator needs all three answered before budgeting: what "annual income" means here and over what period, whether the threshold is assessed per registered business or per premises, and whether a business that grows past Rs 6 million mid-year must install immediately or from the following period. Put them to PRA or your adviser in writing.

This is not a new obligation being introduced. In 2024 PRA issued show-cause notices to more than 100 restaurants for non-compliance. Businesses treating August 2026 as the start of the requirement are two years late to it.

The integration itself is short enough to state in four steps:

1. The POS captures the sale as it normally would.
2. The POS transmits the invoice data to PRA's server in SFD format.
3. PRA returns a fiscal invoice number.
4. The receipt is printed carrying the business name, the business address, the receipt number and the PRA QR code.

That is the whole shape of it, and it is the same shape as the federal system — send, get a number back, print what came back. The difference is everything underneath: a different server, a different format, and a different number.

The four steps above are what can be stated from public sources. PRA does not publish the rest openly, which is why so few systems connect to it — and it is the list to put to any vendor before you sign, because a vendor who cannot answer these has not built against E-IMS:

• What SFD expands to, and where its field-level schema is published.
• The endpoint, the authentication model, and how a business obtains E-IMS credentials.
• Whether PRA provides a test or sandbox environment before a POS goes live.
• The offline behaviour — what a POS must do when PRA's server is unreachable mid-service, whether receipts may be issued and queued, and how long a queued invoice may sit before it is a default. In a restaurant at 9pm this is the single most important question here.
• PRA's published error strings and rejection codes, and what the cashier should see.
• Retention requirements for transmitted invoice data, and in what form PRA may demand it.

We are covering it here because Punjab hospitality operators keep encountering it, usually presented as a deadline. Until a final notification and an Income Tax General Order exist, there is no date to work to.

What the draft contemplates is nonetheless worth knowing, because it would land on many of the same businesses:

• A long list of notified categories, including restaurants, hostels, motels, guest houses, marriage halls, marquees, clubs including race clubs, inter-city road transport operators, courier and cargo services, beauty parlours, clinics, slimming clinics, massage centres, dentists, physiotherapists, plastic surgeons, hair transplant surgeons, veterinary doctors, pathological laboratories, diagnostic centres covering X-ray, CT and MRI, private hospitals, health clubs, gyms, fitness centres, swimming pools, photographers, videographers, event managers, accountants, retailers including manufacturer-cum-retailer, wholesaler-cum-retailer and importer-cum-retailer, foreign exchange dealers and exchange companies, private schools, colleges, universities and vocational training institutes, and online sellers and online marketplaces.
• CCTV cameras at points of sale, with recordings retained for at least one month and produced to the Commissioner on demand.
• An integrator licensing regime: a five-year non-transferable licence from the Board, minimum paid-up capital of Rs 10 million, registration with PSEB or ICAP, audited financial statements for the last three years, and undertakings of no involvement in fiscal fraud or blacklisting.

Plan on the E-IMS obligation, which is real and being enforced now. Do not spend capital against SRO 288 as though it were in force, and be sceptical of any vendor quoting you a compliance date for it.

• E-IMS is provincial and covers Punjab sales tax on services — FBR digital invoicing is federal and neither substitutes for the other
• The threshold is annual income of Rs 6 million or more, lowered from Rs 10 million back in 2024 rather than in 2026
• Since 10 August 2026 handwritten receipts are banned across Punjab for restaurants, hotels, coffee shops and marriage halls
• A compliant receipt carries the business name, the business address, the receipt number and the PRA QR code
• Not issuing an EIMS receipt carries Rs 400,000 to Rs 1,000,000, and repeat violations risk the premises being sealed for up to a month