SRB POS in Sindh: who must integrate

SRB POS integration connects the till in a Sindh service business directly to the Sindh Revenue Board’s computerised system, so that each taxable sale is reported as it happens rather than summarised in a return weeks later. The receipt the customer takes away carries an SRB invoice number and a QR code, which is what makes the transaction verifiable after the fact.

The mechanism sits in the Sindh Sales Tax Special Procedure (Online Integration of Business) Rules, 2022, notified as SRB-3-4/03/2022 on 21 February 2022 and consolidated since. The obligation those rules implement comes from the Sindh Sales Tax on Services Act 2011 — the provincial statute, not the federal Sales Tax Act 1990 that governs FBR digital invoicing.

Where integration applies, rule 3 requires all of that business’s points of sale to be connected, including those taking orders over the internet, and an online marketplace facilitating those services is caught in its own right. Rule 5 charges a service fee of one rupee per invoice generated, reported separately in the return, and rule 6 sets the particulars the invoice has to carry.

The component that receives the data is called the Sales Data Controller, or SDC. It matters more than its name suggests: it is also the path through which sales returns and exchange adjustments are handled, using credit notes. A refund at a Karachi counter therefore has a documented route, rather than being voided quietly in the POS and leaving the reported figure wrong.

Under the Schedule substituted by Notification SRB-3-4/25/2026 with effect from 1 July 2026, a restaurant is caught if it meets any one of five tests: it is located in a hotel, motel or guesthouse; it is a franchiser or franchisee; it has more than one branch in Sindh; it is located in an air-conditioned shopping mall; or its turnover during the immediately preceding twelve tax periods exceeded Rs 5 million.

The second Schedule entry covers beauty and physical well-being services — beauty parlours and salons, beauty clinics, slimming clinics, gyms and physical fitness centres — under a similar set of category tests of their own.

Two things follow that are worth stating plainly. Hotels are not themselves in scope. Being located in a hotel is a criterion that pulls a restaurant or salon outlet in; it is not an obligation on the hotel’s own room revenue. And the mandate does not reach the health sector at large — a clinic providing medical services is not caught by an entry aimed at beauty and physical well-being.

The turnover figure has moved twice. It entered at Rs 10 million in August 2022, was cut to Rs 5 million on 31 July 2023, and remains Rs 5 million in the Schedule substituted for 1 July 2026. A page quoting Rs 10 million is describing a position that ended three years ago, and one quoting no threshold at all is describing a rule that has never existed.

Note also how differently this is drawn from Punjab. PRA’s E-IMS enforcement names four four categories in its enforcement drive, but its actual e-IMS test is turnover — Rs 6 million for restaurant services and Rs 10 million for others. Sindh frames the duty around scheduled services plus category tests, one of which is turnover. A business can sit inside SRB’s scope and outside PRA’s, or the reverse. If you operate in both provinces you are answering two different questions, not one question twice.

A rate that depends on the payment method cannot be handled by a menu price and a calculator. The till has to know how the bill was settled before it can compute the tax, which means the payment step and the invoicing step are no longer independent — and a split payment, part card and part cash, has to be resolved rather than guessed.

This is where a counter set up for federal invoicing alone tends to break. FBR’s structure does not vary with the payment channel, so a system built only for it usually computes tax before payment is taken. In Sindh that ordering is wrong, and the error is invisible until a reconciliation or an audit surfaces it months later.

The reduced rate is not free, either. Input tax credit is not admissible at 8%, so a restaurant with meaningful input tax may be worse off on card sales than the headline difference suggests. That is exactly why the special dispensation exists: charge 15% across the board, keep input adjustments, and remove the branching from the counter entirely. It is a pricing decision with tax consequences, so it belongs with your adviser — but it is worth knowing the option is there before rebuilding a till around per-payment logic.