Insights

ZATCA announces the Fatoora go-live and simulation portal

22 December: The Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) has recently informed taxpayers about establishing a new "Fatoora simulation portal" (FSP) which will be available by 27 December 2022. The FSP will be a testing environment, a replica of the ZATCA's Fatoora Portal, aimed at enabling the taxpayers to test and experience the end-to-end e-invoicing journey, including onboarding an IT system, clearance and reporting of e-invoices and related notes. 

The FSP can be accessed on ZATCA's Fatoora portal via a dedicated tile after logging in and should only be used for testing purposes with dummy or historical data. The response in the FSP should not be considered an official clearance or reporting of the documents by ZATCA. Therefore, the testing on the ZATCA's Fatoora portal will end on 23 December 2022 and shall continue on the FSP from 27 December 2022.

The ZATCA's Fatoora portal will be available on 26 December 2022 for the taxpayers, who are part of the wave one integration phase of the e-invoicing, to start onboarding their IT production systems. Any documents shared on the Fatoora portal will be considered official tax invoices and notes per the VAT Implementation and E-invoicing Regulations. 

We understand that the ZATCA's Fatoora portal and FSP will only be available to those taxpayers who are part of wave one of the integration phase of the e-invoicing or whitelisted by ZATCA. However, we expect that ZATCA's Fatoora portal and FSP will be available to all the resident VAT registered taxpayers in the coming months. 

E-invoicing was introduced last year in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Phase one of the implementation, the generation phase, was applicable on 4 December 2021. Phase two of the implementation, the integration phase, will go live on 1 January 2023 (for wave one taxpayers). This phase will require taxpayers to integrate their invoicing systems with ZATCA's Fatoora Portal in a number of structured waves.

Did you find this useful?