Digital marking of alcohol becomes mandatory from 2027: time to prepare your accounting

Kazakhstan has announced the timeline: digital marking of alcohol products becomes mandatory from 2027. Every bottle will carry a unique code tracing its path from factory to checkout — the same logic that already covers tobacco, footwear and medicines.

Experience with previous product groups gives an honest picture of what awaits market players. Producers and importers face code-application equipment and warehouse process changes; retail — cash register and accounting updates; everyone — integration with the national tracking system. The biggest problems businesses hit were not the codes themselves but the joints: when marking lives separately from the accounting system, every goods receipt and sale turns into double work.

So the best advice for the industry is to start with accounting, not printers. While the deadline is far off, clean up your product catalog and stock records, decide how codes will flow into your 1C or POS system, and pilot at a single location. Routine work like reconciling deliveries against codes is worth designing for automation from day one — such regular checks map well onto AI agents that watch for discrepancies themselves and raise the alarm when numbers don't match. From 2027 this is not an option but a condition of staying in the market.