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Saudi Arabia is the largest economy in the Middle East and a strategic gateway to the wider Arabic region. It also operates one of the world's most mature and tightly controlled e-invoicing frameworks: for taxpayers brought into Phase 2, standard invoices must be cleared by ZATCA before they are issued to the buyer. This mix of commercial opportunity and technically demanding compliance makes a single-platform approach valuable for companies operating or expanding in the country.

What you must know about Saudi Arabia

Scope and model	The mandate applies to resident VAT-registered taxable persons and parties issuing invoices on their behalf across B2B, B2G and B2C. Standard invoices require real-time clearance; simplified invoices are reported within 24 hours. Phase 2 applies in taxpayer waves.
Phased rollout	December 2021: Phase 1 introduced mandatory electronic invoice generation and storage. January 2023: Phase 2 introduced API integration, rolling out in waves based on ZATCA's taxpayer criteria.
Formats	ZATCA clearance and reporting submissions use UBL 2.1 XML based on the KSA CIUS. A PDF/A-3 representation with embedded XML can be provided to buyers.
Security and QR codes	Simplified documents are cryptographically stamped by the taxpayer's EGS before reporting. Standard documents are validated and stamped by ZATCA during clearance. The applicable QR code is included in the buyer-facing invoice.
Corrections	ZATCA may accept, accept with warnings or reject a submitted document. Rejected documents must be corrected and resubmitted according to ZATCA's rules. Once issued, invoices must not be altered; corrections are made using credit and debit notes.
Cross-border	Exports: generally cleared as standard invoices where the Saudi supplier is subject to Phase 2. Imports: foreign-supplier invoices are generally outside Fatoora issuance; import VAT or reverse-charge requirements may apply. Self-billing is not automatic and requires a qualifying approved arrangement.
Inbound invoices	Invoices are delivered directly from supplier to buyer; ZATCA does not provide an invoice retrieval API for buyers. Buyers must retain appropriate invoice evidence in accordance with the applicable requirements.
Peppol	Not used. Regulatory clearance and reporting take place through ZATCA's APIs, while suppliers remain responsible for delivering invoices to buyers.
Archiving	Invoices must generally be retained electronically for at least six years, remain accessible and preserve the relevant integrity and audit information. Storage must comply with applicable Saudi VAT, cloud-hosting and data-residency requirements.
Penalties	Non-compliance may result in warnings, financial penalties or other enforcement action, depending on the nature and recurrence of the violation.

Timeline

Our Saudi Arabia solution is currently fully available since September 2026

How we can help with a managed compliance service

For large organisations, the challenge in Saudi Arabia is running clearance and reporting reliably at volume, integrating those processes with existing systems, and keeping pace with ZATCA's technical and schema updates.

With ecosio's managed compliance service for e-invoicing, we help teams:

Connect through a single gateway to ZATCA's Clearance and Reporting APIs, with submission visibility in ecosio Monitor.
Map and transform ERP data into ZATCA-compliant UBL 2.1 XML and validate documents before submission to help reduce rejections.
Route each document through the correct process: clearance for standard invoices and reporting within 24 hours for simplified invoices.
Produce a buyer-facing PDF/A-3 representation with embedded XML and the applicable QR code for onward delivery.
Integrate the Saudi e-invoicing process with existing business systems, including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics environments.
Provide the final invoice artefacts needed for onward delivery and retention. Saudi invoice records must generally be retained for at least six years, subject to the applicable storage and data-residency requirements.

Want to know more about Saudi Arabia? Take a deeper look in our country profile page, where our FAQ answers the questions customers ask most often. And if you are ready to discuss how ecosio can support your business case in Saudi Arabia and many other countries, get in touch today!

The ecosio Product team

Public

Aug 25

Aug 25, 2026

Investigate, reconcile and bill faster: latest Monitor updates

Monitor just got four upgrades that make self-service investigation, reconciliation and billing quicker and more precise. You can now follow how messages connect, break Statistics down by identifier, and filter both Statistics and the Message Overview to an exact time.

Why this matters

High message volumes, multi-entity billing and time-critical support all create the same problem: the answer is somewhere in Monitor, but it takes too long to reach. Reconciling billing by subsidiary often meant exporting to Excel, and tracing one message could mean scrolling through a whole day of traffic. These four updates put the connections, identifiers and exact time windows you need right where you're already working.

What's new

Follow the full story of a message - Linked messages on the Message Overview

Tracing how a message related to others, its duplications, splits, merges, partner switches, used to mean manual searching with no way to see or jump between the links. Now the Message Overview surfaces those connections for you, so an investigation that once spanned several screens happens in a couple of clicks. This one came straight from customer requests.

Spot connected messages instantly with a linked-messages count, shown up to 99+
Jump straight to the message you need, previewing up to five references on hover or opening the full list
Trust what you're looking at, with each reference tied to the ecosio Message ID and a tooltip to explain it

Break billing down by your own identifier - GLN and identifier filter on Statistics

Multi-entity customers could only split billing data by partner, not by their own identifiers, so reconciling by subsidiary usually ended up in Excel. Now you can filter Statistics by a single identifier such as GLN, Peppol participant ID or customer number, so your billing view lines up with how your business is actually structured. It's one of our most-requested Statistics improvements.

Reconcile by subsidiary, not just by partner, filtering by one identifier per query
Find the right identifier fast with free text or the alias dropdown, plus a tooltip showing what's searchable
Hand over clean numbers, with filtered report downloads matching your selection

Validate billable volumes to the exact hour - Date and time picker on Statistics billable messages

Statistics could only be filtered by preset ranges like this week, so checking billable volumes around a specific event, such as a go-live or a sudden spike, wasn't possible. Now you can narrow billable message statistics to an exact date and hour range and carry that straight into your export, so the numbers are easy to validate and defend.

Check volumes around a specific event by picking an exact date and hour range
Match the source data, with filtering by full hours in line with how billable data is stored
Back up the figures, with your selection included in the CSV export

Pinpoint the exact time - Time picker on the Message Overview

Filtering the Message Overview by date alone meant paging through everything that happened that day to find a single message. Now you can filter to an exact time, down to the minute, so a time-critical investigation takes seconds instead of a scroll through hours of traffic. This came straight from your feedback.

Find the exact moment an issue happened, setting start and end times down to the minute
Cut investigation time from a full-day scroll to a few seconds
Keep the detail, with your selection included in CSV downloads

Technical notes

Some features depend on customer configuration, permissions or rollout status, so availability may vary by company and user
Linked messages show a count up to 99+, with up to five references on hover and the full list in the modal
The Statistics identifier filter works one identifier at a time
The Statistics date and time picker works by full hours, while the Message Overview time picker goes down to the minute
Linked message references use the internal ecosio Message ID, not your own message reference

Take a look in Monitor and tell us what you think🔥

The ecosio Product team

Connect Public Documentation Public

Aug 5

Aug 5, 2026

China connector: set up, manage and verify in Monitor

China e-invoicing comes with country-specific steps that can slow teams down, and authentication is the first of them. Until your China connector is authenticated, it can't send or receive invoices. That step is now yours to complete in Monitor, whenever you are ready. We keep the connection to the tax authority running. You decide when to switch it on.

Activate your China connector yourself. A guided flow from start to finish, at your own pace.
Download the official OFD invoice. The cleared invoice exactly as the tax authority issued it, straight from the e-invoicing toolbox.

Activate your connector in one guided flow

It all happens on one screen. Enter your account details, request an SMS code to your registered phone number, enter the SMS code and then scan the QR code to complete facial recognition in the State Taxation Administration app. Confirm in Monitor, and your connector is active.

Click through the flow before you start:

The verification codes are time-limited, so if one runs out, or you step away before you're finished, you can start the flow again as often as you need.

Stay ahead of expiring Tax Agent IDs

Your Tax Agent IDs tell the tax authority which agent is authorised to invoice on your behalf, and they don't last forever. When one expires, sending and receiving stops for that Tax Agent.

So Monitor keeps them in plain sight. Add as many Tax Agent IDs as your connector needs, see them all in the connector details, and get a warning as an expiry date approaches, while there's still time to act. The first ID you verify is what brings your connector to life.

Download the invoice the tax authority cleared

Whenever you need to prove an invoice really cleared, whether for an audit, a customer query or your own records, the proof is already in Monitor. Once an invoice reaches a cleared state, you can download the official OFD file straight from the e-invoicing toolbox, exactly as the tax authority issued it, carrying the invoice identifier, QR code and digital signature that prove it cleared.

OFD is China's official fixed layout format, the human-readable rendering of a cleared e-fapiao. It's similar in purpose to a PDF, but OFD is the format the Chinese ecosystem expects.

You activate your connector and manage your Tax Agent IDs, so you can be live in China sooner and stay live without interruptions. We keep the connection to the tax authority running and the rules behind it up to date, so the parts you handle stay simple.✨

Want to know more about self-service connectors, or have activation switched on for your Monitor? Get in touch with our team and we'll take it from there.