I paid the cost of a new employee's visa — how should that be booked?

The cost of sponsoring an employee's residence is made up of several separate components: the work permit or labour card fee, entry permit, medical fitness test, Emirates ID fee, the residence stamping itself, mandatory health insurance, and sometimes typing or attestation service fees. The total varies significantly by emirate, free zone versus mainland, and the company's classification with the Ministry of Human Resources — so there's no single figure you can generalise across every case, and what matters most is grouping these components together under that employee's onboarding cost rather than scattering them across general administrative expenses.

From an accounting standpoint, this cost is generally booked as an operating expense in the period it's incurred, since it's tied to a residence permit valid for a set term (typically two or three years depending on the type) rather than a fixed asset. As a default, the employer bears this cost, and recovering it from the employee if they resign early is not automatic — some contracts include an explicit partial-recovery clause for the first year, but that's a specific contractual term, not a general legal rule. RASEEKH ties onboarding costs to each employee's cost centre from the start, so you know your real hiring cost, not just the headline salary.