Saudi Arabia: End of integration phase pilot project and Fatoora portal go-live date

26 December, 2022

In brief

The Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (‘ZATCA’) has announced the end of ‘Fatoora Pilot Testing’ project for selected participants from 23 December 2022 and a new pilot testing portal, “Fatoora Simulation Portal”, has been established. The portal will be available for taxpayers from 27 December 2022 and will act as a replica of the production environment.

More importantly, the official Fatoora portal will be available (Go-Live) from 26 December 2022 and taxpayers can begin onboarding their respective production systems. Any invoices shared with the Fatoora portal will be considered as official tax invoices, according to the VAT Implementation Regulations and the E-invoicing Regulations.

E-Invoicing integration phase pilot testing project has been closed and a new simulation portal has been introduced by ZATCA for testing purposes.

Tax and Legal Services PwC Middle East

In detail

Earlier this year, ZATCA introduced a pilot testing project for a select group of participants to onboard their E-invoicing generation solutions to assess the effectiveness of the portal.

After completing the process and deliberations, ZATCA announced the closure of the pilot testing project from 23 December 2022 onwards. After the closure date, all the historical test transactional data will be deleted, any previous onboarded solutions will be deactivated by ZATCA and taxpayers will not be able to use the “Fatoora portal” for testing purposes.

Fatoora Simulation Portal

For taxpayers who want to conduct/perform testing, a new Fatoora Simulation portal has been established, which will be available for taxpayers from 27 December 2022.

This ‘Fatoora Simulation Portal’ will act as a replica of the production environment and aims to aid taxpayers to test and experience the end-to-end E-Invoicing journey.

The new portal is not intended for generating actual invoices and/or any load or performance testing. However, taxpayers can perform end-to-end testing of the E-invoicing generation and integration process using any data (i.e. dummy data, historical data, etc.)

Please refer to the link for the updated Fatoora portal user manual.

Official Fatoora portal go live

The official Fatoora portal that is meant to be used for integration phase purposes will be available (Go-Live) from 26 December 2022 onwards.

Taxpayers can begin onboarding their respective production systems and invoices shared with the Fatoora portal will be considered as official tax invoices, according to the VAT Implementation Regulation and the E-invoicing Regulation.

Any VAT registered taxpayer will be eligible to onboard their production system, as no approval is needed from ZATCA.

Taxpayers (who are either part of wave 1 or will be required to integrate as part of wave 2) need to share invoices with ZATCA after the respective E-invoicing generation solution has been onboarded and integrated with the official Fatoora portal. For other taxpayers who are not notified through wave 1 or wave 2, they can proceed and test their system’s readiness and compliance on the ‘Fatoora Simulation Portal’.

The takeaway

Taxpayers who are part of the first wave as announced and communicated by ZATCA (exceeding revenues SAR 1 billion) can now start integrating E-Invoicing generation solution(s) with the official Fatoora portal from 26 December 2022.

As the data shared will be considered official now, it is very critical to assess and ensure all field level and security requirements as satisfied.

Taxpayers who are not part of first wave may continue using FATOORA simulation portal for testing purposes from 27 December 2022 and onwards.