Abu Dhabi starts e-licence from April 8

The Department of Economic Development (DED) in Abu Dhabi is due to start the process of issuing electronic trade licences on Sunday April 8. All clients will have to submit required documents in electronic format in future.

Mohamed Moneef Al Mansouri, acting executive director of the Commercial Affairs Division at DED, said this measure is being introduced to speed up the process of issuing trade licences in Abu Dhabi.

He said this measure will help reduce the procedures for issuing a trade licence, help reduce the use of paper, minimise file storage and archiving costs, and will also make retrieval easier.

Al Mansouri said the total number of trade licences documents archived in the traditional way from January through November 2011 amounted to 26,388. The total number of archived pages came to 484,429 and xeroxed pages 1,88,847.

Al Mansouri said in the second half of 2011, the number of trade licenses issued in Abu Dhabi amounted to 295,515, compared to 79,655 in January and February 2012 alone.

The DED organised three workshops in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and the Western Region for 70 owners of printing houses to acquaint them with electronic archiving and transactions. During the workshop, trainees were trained in scanning documents required for electronic trade licenses.

DED will next week start distributing guide booklets to customers to acquaint them with the mechanisms whereby they can have all necessary documents issued smoothly. This incorporates the archiving system's general targets, general guidelines and the recommended setting for scanning a document, apart from a list of 63 file names which an applicant should abide by when saving an electronic file.

DED will start next week sending SMS to all clients to inform them of the date of receiving their transactions electronically.

During the workshop, owners of printing houses in Abu Dhabi, the Western Region and Al Ain were instructed to ask their clients to scan their original documents only in TIF, JPEG or PDF formats. However, it is preferably to scan documents using PDF format, otherwise no other formats would be accepted. Scanned documents must be clear and readable when verified against the original documents.

The workshops also emphasised that it is necessary for a customer to save all his scanned documents on one file when presenting them to the DED's Customer Service centre, especially if the total number of pages exceeds 30 pages, such as in cases of contracts etc...

The workshops have also pointed out that owners of printing houses, when naming a file, must give the trade licence file the same name of the document. For example, if a file contains a passport copy, then the file must be named "passport" only. This is to make saving and retrieving files easier.

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