Who you would be dealing with
Freelance DXB is a trading name of Trivup Documents Clearing Services, a documents-clearing company licensed in Dubai and working from Sheikh Zayed Road. The licence is the whole basis of what we do: it is the permission a private firm needs to lodge paperwork with government departments for someone else. It is not a permission to decide anything.
There are three kinds of firm in this market and they are easy to confuse. There are law firms, which advise on legal consequence. There are tax advisers, who tell you what a change of status does to your position. And there are documents-clearing companies, which is what we are: licensed to prepare and lodge applications with UAE government departments on a client’s behalf. We are useful for the third thing and we will say so when you need one of the first two.
It is worth being blunt about what no firm here can offer, because someone will offer it to you. No private company in the UAE is government approved, endorsed or appointed — that status does not exist for private firms, and a competitor claiming it is describing something imaginary. Every licence and visa is granted by the authority that issues it, on its own reading of the file. Anyone promising you an approval is promising you a decision that is not theirs to make.
What is genuinely ours to control is whether the file is right. The failure mode is rarely the visa itself; it is the mismatch nobody checked. Activities on the licence that do not cover half of what you actually invoice for. A trade name your clients’ procurement systems reject. A resignation timed so there is a gap between one visa ending and the next beginning. A structure chosen for speed that you outgrow in eighteen months and pay to unwind. Those are the questions we ask at the start, and they are the reason the first conversation takes longer with us than it might elsewhere.
Consultants work in English, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu, and you deal with one of them directly rather than a queue.
How we work
Undertakings are only worth reading if they are inconvenient to the firm making them. These four are.
You get the figure in writing before anything is lodged, itemised so our fee and the authorities’ charges are not blended into one number. If an authority moves a fee mid-file, that comes back to you as a decision, not as a line on an invoice at the end.
No authority pays us a commission, which means the zone we recommend is the one your activities and your budget point at. Frequently that is not the best-known name, and the rights attaching to the licence are identical.
Most licences are issued against activities chosen quickly and regretted slowly. We start from what you actually bill clients for, in their words, and work back to the codes — because a licence that does not cover your main revenue line is a problem that surfaces at the bank, not at the counter.
For some practices the day count does not work, or the tax position abroad makes the move pointless, or an employment route is simply better. We would rather establish that in the first hour than take a fee for a structure you will unwind.
Scope
We do not give tax advice. Whether UAE residency improves your position, what your home country will still assert over you, when corporate tax reaches a practice of your size — these turn on facts about you that belong with a qualified tax adviser, and a documents-clearing licence confers no competence to answer them. We will tell you which questions to take there.
We do not give legal advice, draft your client contracts, or opine on whether an arrangement is employment or a service. We do not issue licences or visas; every one of those is the authority’s decision. And we do not sell health insurance, though you will need it and it is not inside our fee.
Where something is outside what we do, you will get a straight answer that it is, rather than an attempt at it.
The consultation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Come with the specifics — the status you hold now, what you want to invoice for, your notice period if you are employed — and you will get a straight read on what actually applies to you. For a good number of people that is far less than they expected.