The part nobody warns you about
Most of what is written about ZATCA Phase 2 is about the deadline. The deadline is the easy part: you are told your wave, and you have months. The part that surprises finance teams is what happens on the first Sunday afterwards, when a large invoice to a corporate customer comes back rejected because the buyer’s commercial registration was recorded with a dash in it.
Under the Integration Phase, an invoice that the Authority has not accepted is not a valid invoice. It cannot be sent to the customer, so it cannot be collected against, so the revenue behind it sits still. Compliance stops being a filing exercise and becomes part of the cash cycle.
This page is what a Saudi business actually has to satisfy, written for the person who has to sign off on it rather than the person who will configure it. The full technical procedure is published in our documentation.
Clearance and reporting are not the same obligation
Fatoora treats a sale to a business and a sale to a consumer as two different problems, and almost every Phase 2 misunderstanding traces back to conflating them.
| Standard invoice (B2B) | Simplified invoice (B2C) | |
|---|---|---|
| Path | Clearance | Reporting |
| Valid when | ZATCA returns it stamped | The moment it is issued |
| Before the buyer sees it | Must be cleared first | Handed over at the till |
| Deadline | Before sharing | Reported within 24 hours |
A retailer with a wholesale arm issues both, and each invoice has to travel the right path. That routing should be decided by the document type, not by a person remembering which queue an invoice belongs in — the most common source of a 24-hour reporting breach is a simplified invoice that somebody parked in the clearance pile.
The certificate you cannot skip
No system may submit anything until it has onboarded with the Authority, and onboarding is a three-step handshake rather than a form. Your system builds a certificate signing request from your tax data; it submits that request with a one-time password generated from the Fatoora portal and sends sample invoices to prove it can produce compliant documents; and only then does the Authority issue the production certificate that live submission depends on.
Two practical consequences follow. The OTP expires, so the person holding the Fatoora portal login and the person running the onboarding need to be in the same room or on the same call. And the compliance samples are matched to the invoice types you have enabled — turn on standard invoices and it will validate standard invoice, credit note and debit note samples — so enabling types you do not actually issue makes onboarding harder, not safer.
What you need before you start
Onboarding fails on missing reference data far more often than on anything technical. Before the day, have the business’s fifteen-digit VAT registration number, its commercial registration number, its complete national address — country, city, governorate, district, street, building number, postal code, the lot — and the serial number of the invoicing unit. The national address is not a formality: a missing building number stops the configuration from validating.
Where invoices actually get rejected
Four causes account for most of it, and all four are data problems rather than integration problems.
The buyer cannot be identified. A standard invoice must carry either the buyer’s VAT number or one of the Authority’s identity schemes — commercial registration, the unified national number, a national ID for a citizen, an Iqama for a resident, a passport for a visitor. Whichever you use, the value has to be alphanumeric: a dash or a space in a commercial registration is a rejection.
A zero-rated or exempt line has no stated reason. Every line is classified by VAT category, and anything other than the standard rate needs the Authority’s corresponding VATEX reason code — exports, medicines, private education and healthcare to citizens, international transport and the rest each have their own. Set them once against your tax codes and the question never reaches the invoice.
The standard rate is not exactly 15%. A line categorised as standard-rated with any other rate on it will not clear.
The tax group is not declared. Covered in the questions below, and worth checking early.
Proving what you submitted, months later
An auditor’s question is rarely “is this compliant” — it is “is this the invoice you sent”. After clearance, the legally valid document is the cleared version ZATCA returned, carrying the official QR code, and a system that keeps only its own copy cannot answer that question.
Nama ERP holds the exact XML the Authority received and can also regenerate the XML from the document as it stands today. Exporting both and comparing them answers it directly: if they differ, the source document was edited after submission. It is a small capability that saves a long afternoon.
Where Nama ERP fits
Namasoft is listed in ZATCA’s Solution Providers Directory among the Phase 2 qualified solution providers — worth checking for yourself, and worth checking for any supplier you are comparing us against. Read what the Authority says beside that list, too: it is a guiding list rather than an approval of anyone’s product, which is why nobody in this market holds a “ZATCA certificate” and why an offer of one deserves a second look.
Beyond the listing, Nama generates, signs and submits from inside the ledger. The invoice your team raises is the invoice that gets cleared — there is no export file, no middleware licence, and no compliance database sitting alongside the accounts that can quietly drift out of step with them. Onboarding runs from inside the system, and sandbox and simulation environments are supported so a rollout is rehearsed before it is live.
The module page covers the mechanics in detail.
Good question — already answered
Is Nama ERP certified by ZATCA?
Namasoft is listed in ZATCA's Solution Providers Directory as a Phase 2 qualified solution provider, and you can verify that against the directory yourself. Be precise about what the status is, because the distinction comes up in tenders: ZATCA states in the directory itself that the list is a guiding one and not an approval of any provider's solution, so there is no ZATCA certificate that a vendor holds. The certificate that authorises live submission is issued against your own VAT registration when you onboard — a step Nama performs from inside the system.
What is the difference between Phase 1 and Phase 2?
Phase 1, the Generation Phase, asked you to stop issuing handwritten and free-form invoices and produce them from a compliant system. Phase 2, the Integration Phase, connects that system to the Authority: every invoice is produced as UBL 2.1 XML, cryptographically signed, and either cleared or reported through Fatoora. Phase 1 changed what your invoice looked like. Phase 2 changes whether it counts.
Do simplified invoices have to be cleared before I hand them to the customer?
No — and this is the distinction most worth getting right. A simplified invoice for a consumer carries its QR code from the moment it is issued and is valid immediately; it is reported to the Authority within 24 hours. A standard invoice to a business is the opposite: it is not valid until ZATCA returns it cleared, and it must not be shared with the buyer before that.
How long do we have to send an invoice after its date?
Three days by default, and the same window applies to cancelling one. Both limits are configurable in Nama ERP, so a business whose posting cycle needs a different window can set it — but the point of the default is that a submission backlog is a compliance problem, not an administrative one.
We are part of a tax group. Does that change the setup?
Yes, in one specific way. If the eleventh digit of your VAT registration number is 1, you belong to a tax group, and the onboarding request must carry your ten-digit record number as the organisation unit. Without it the Authority will not issue the certificate at all — which is why this is worth checking before onboarding day rather than during it.
