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ZATCA Phase 2 requirements: a checklist for Saudi businesses

Phase 2 of e-invoicing in Saudi Arabia, the integration phase, connects your invoicing system directly to ZATCA’s Fatoora platform. This checklist sums up what Phase 2 asks of a business and its software, so you can prepare before your wave date.

It is a practical summary, not legal or tax advice. ZATCA’s published e-invoicing regulations, technical specifications and guidelines are the authority; check them, or ask your tax adviser, for your own case.

1. Know your wave and your date

  • ZATCA brings taxpayers into Phase 2 in waves, based on their taxable revenue, and notifies each taxpayer in advance
  • Check the notification in your ZATCA account and note your go-live date
  • Start early: onboarding, testing and staff training usually take longer than expected

2. Make sure your system produces compliant invoices

  • Invoices and credit and debit notes produced as structured XML in the format ZATCA specifies
  • Each document signed with a cryptographic stamp from a certificate issued to your e-invoicing unit
  • Each document linked to the previous one by its hash, with an unbroken counter, so documents cannot be changed or removed unnoticed
  • A QR code on every printed or PDF invoice, with the data ZATCA requires for Phase 2
  • The mandatory fields: seller and, for standard invoices, buyer VAT numbers and addresses, invoice date, line VAT categories and totals, in Arabic (other languages may be added)

3. Clearance and reporting

  • Standard tax invoices (business to business) must be cleared by ZATCA before you give them to the buyer
  • Simplified tax invoices (business to consumer) are given to the buyer at once and reported to ZATCA within 24 hours
  • Credit and debit notes follow the same route as the invoice they correct
  • Plan what happens when a document is rejected or ZATCA cannot be reached: who fixes it, and how it is sent again

4. Onboard your e-invoicing units

  • Register each invoicing unit (for example each branch, till or system) on the Fatoora portal with a one-time code
  • Pass ZATCA’s compliance checks before the production certificate is issued
  • Keep track of certificate expiry dates and renew them in time
  • Test in ZATCA’s sandbox and simulation environments before going live

5. Prepare your data and your people

  • Customer master data: VAT numbers, national addresses and identification for business customers
  • Correct VAT categories and exemption reasons on products and services
  • Your company’s Arabic name and address as registered
  • Staff who know how to issue, correct and re-send documents, and who watches the queue of documents waiting for ZATCA
  • Records kept for the period the VAT rules require

6. Questions to ask your software provider

  • Does the system connect to ZATCA directly, or through a middleware provider you also pay?
  • Which document types are supported: standard and simplified invoices, credit and debit notes, prepayment, export and self-billed invoices?
  • Has it been tested against ZATCA’s sandbox, and can you rehearse in the simulation environment with your own data?
  • What happens to a rejected or undelivered document?
  • Are the printed invoices in Arabic with the QR code?

How Solventro handles Phase 2

Solventro’s ZATCA Phase 2 integration is built directly on ZATCA’s APIs, without middleware, and tested against ZATCA’s sandbox for every invoice type and VAT category. Each company registers its own units with its own VAT number; standard invoices are cleared and simplified invoices reported, with credit and debit notes, prepayment, export and self-billed invoices, QR codes, Arabic and English printouts, checks before issue and retries. We describe it as built for Phase 2, not as approved or certified: ask us for a walkthrough in the sandbox or simulation environment before you decide.