Kazakhstan may scrap VAT for digital and QR payments

Kazakhstan is discussing scrapping VAT for digital and QR payments. The initiative's logic is transparent: make cashless settlements economically better than cash, pull turnover out of the shadows, and speed up the retreat of cash where it still holds — small retail, services, marketplaces.

If adopted, it is a rare case for SMEs where a tax incentive coincides with the technology trend. Moving to digital payments drags the whole accounting chain toward health: every transaction exists electronically from the start, needs no manual entry, doesn't get lost and doesn't diverge from the till.

You can prepare now without waiting for the decision: measure the cash share of your turnover and understand what keeps it high — customer habits, fees, missing terminals at some locations. Remember the second benefit too: digital turnover is the data automation runs on. When payments flow through the bank, the question "how much came in cashless this week, and from which locations" is answered by an agent rather than the accountant — in 1Cifer it reads bank data directly, so accounting stops being the bottleneck of cashless growth.