Readiness assessment
Establishing which wave applies to you, what your current system actually produces, and the distance between the two. Delivered as a written gap list with owners and dates, not a verbal reassurance.
Service area 02
Fatoora is not an accounting change. It is an IT project with a legal deadline.
ZATCA e-invoicing moves invoicing from something your finance team does to something your systems do, in a format ZATCA validates in real time. Businesses that treat it as a software purchase tend to discover the gap late.
Orientation
Two phases, and they ask for very different things.
Phase 1 changed what an invoice has to look like. Phase 2 changed who has to see it before your customer does.
| Phase 1 — Generation | Phase 2 — Integration | |
|---|---|---|
| In force from | 4 December 2021, all resident taxpayers | 1 January 2023, in waves by annual taxable revenue |
| What it requires | Invoices generated and stored in a structured electronic format. No handwritten or scanned documents. | Invoices exchanged with ZATCA's platform through an integrated, compliant solution. |
| Format | Electronic, with a QR code on simplified invoices | XML, or PDF/A-3 with the XML embedded |
| Security | Tamper-resistant storage | Cryptographic stamp, UUID, and a hash chaining each invoice to the last |
| ZATCA involvement | None at the point of issue | Clearance or reporting, depending on invoice type |
The part that catches people
Clearance and reporting are not the same obligation.
A standard tax invoice — business to business, or business to government — has to be sent to ZATCA and cleared before you give it to your customer. If clearance fails, you do not have a valid invoice to issue. That is a live dependency in your sales process, not a back-office task.
A simplified tax invoice — business to consumer, the till receipt case — is issued immediately and reported to ZATCA afterwards, within 24 hours.
Businesses that do both need both flows working, and most discover the B2B clearance dependency only when a customer is waiting for an invoice they cannot issue.
| Standard | Simplified | |
|---|---|---|
| Used for | B2B and B2G | B2C |
| ZATCA step | Clearance | Reporting |
| Timing | Before issue to the buyer | Within 24 hours of issue |
| QR code | Required | Required |
| Blocks the sale? | Yes, if clearance fails | No |
Scope
What we take on.
Whether you are approaching a wave date, already integrated and failing validations, or still on Phase 1 and unsure whether that is still enough.
Solution selection
Choosing between an ERP module, a middleware layer or a standalone compliant solution — judged against your invoice volume, how many systems raise invoices, and whether anyone still issues one by hand.
ZATCA onboarding
Generating the certificate signing request, obtaining the cryptographic stamp identifier, and passing ZATCA's compliance checks in the sandbox before anything touches production.
Invoice mapping
Every mandatory field mapped from your data to the ZATCA schema — VAT numbers, buyer identifiers, line-level tax categories, exemption reasons. Most rejections at go-live are a missing or wrongly coded field, not a broken connection.
Integration testing
Clearance and reporting exercised against real invoice patterns, including the awkward ones — credit notes, debit notes, foreign currency, exports, zero-rated and exempt supplies, and corrections.
Prohibited functions review
ZATCA bans certain capabilities outright — altering or deleting an invoice after issue, changing the system clock, uncontrolled access to sequence counters. Systems that allowed these historically need them closed off and evidenced.
Archiving & retrieval
E-invoices must be stored so they can be produced on request, in the Kingdom, for the full retention period. Making sure that is genuinely true — and testable — rather than assumed because the software vendor said so.
Live support
What happens when a clearance fails at four on a Thursday afternoon. Monitoring rejection rates, diagnosing recurring causes, and fixing them at source rather than reissuing by hand each time.
ZATCA publishes wave criteria, technical specifications and deadlines and revises them periodically. Everything above is a general description of the regime, not advice on your obligations — your wave date and requirements should be confirmed against ZATCA's current published guidance.
E-Invoicing
Tell us what raises your invoices today.
That one answer usually determines how large this project is.