E-invoice

Meaning

An e-invoice (الفاتورة الإلكترونية) is a tax invoice or simplified tax invoice issued through an electronic system in a structured, tamper-evident form, as ZATCA's e-invoicing regulation requires of every VAT-registered resident business. A scanned paper invoice or a PDF typed in a word processor is not an e-invoice. The regulation came in two phases: generation, from 4 December 2021, when invoices had to be produced electronically with a QR code and the system had to stop editing and deleting issued invoices; and integration, from 1 January 2023 in waves, when the invoice became an XML document exchanged with ZATCA's platform, FATOORA.

The practical effect for a business: invoicing software from ZATCA's list, invoices kept as files for six years, and no handwritten or spreadsheet invoices.

Also called: electronic invoice · FATOORA · ZATCA e-invoicing

Example

A clinic in Phase 1 prints its invoices from its software with a QR code encoding the clinic's name, VAT number, time, total and VAT. When its wave of Phase 2 arrives, the same software starts producing the invoice as signed XML and sending it to FATOORA, and the printed copy carries the QR ZATCA returns.