Questions, answered properly

Not for issuing a compliant invoice, and no honest e-invoicing product can. A Phase 2 invoice is sealed with a cryptographic stamp and a counter value that ZATCA has to allocate — both need the connection at the moment of issue. Any vendor promising offline sealing is either not doing Phase 2 or is issuing documents that will not stand up. What we do instead is make a bad connection survivable. Simplified invoices have a 24-hour reporting window, so a short outage is not a compliance failure — Navira keeps retrying inside it. A till that loses connection mid-sale and resends cannot ring the same sale up twice, because the API is idempotent. And nothing is ever lost: the document is saved before any network call to ZATCA is attempted.

Creating a company and issuing your first Phase 1 compliant invoice — bilingual, with the QR code — takes about ten minutes and needs nothing from ZATCA. Phase 2 takes longer only because ZATCA is involved: you generate a signing request in Navira, paste an OTP from the Fatoora portal, and the device runs six compliance checks. Most merchants finish in half an hour, in one sitting.

No. Onboarding is a guided wizard — you paste an OTP and press a button; Navira generates the keys, builds the certificate request and runs the checks. A developer is only needed if you want to push invoices in from your own system, which is optional and documented.

Yes — customers and products import from CSV, with a preview of what will be created before anything is written, and duplicate detection on the way in.

Yes, and it's a good time to: QuickBooks has no ZATCA Phase 2 integration, so if you're issuing tax invoices in Saudi Arabia on it, you already need to move regardless of preference. In the UAE, QuickBooks is a general accounting tool without a UAE-specific VAT/e-invoicing focus, so switching is a smaller step. Migrating your existing customers, products and invoice history is part of standard onboarding, not a separate project.

The engine is onboarded and active on ZATCA's Fatoora simulation environment: a CSID has been issued, all six compliance checks pass, and invoices are signed, cleared and returning zero warnings. The document pipeline is validated against ZATCA's own FATOORA SDK rather than against our reading of the specification. Simulation is the stage ZATCA requires you to pass before it issues a production certificate — every merchant crosses it on their own VAT number, which is why onboarding is per-merchant and not something a vendor can do once for everybody.

Yes. Phase 2 certificates are issued to your VAT number, not to ours — you keep an account on ZATCA's Fatoora portal, and the OTP you paste into Navira comes from it. This is how the regulation is designed: your cryptographic identity stays yours, and it moves with you if you ever leave.

The rejection and the authority's exact reason are stored against that document and shown on it — not swallowed into a log nobody reads. Standard (B2B) invoices are cleared before they reach the buyer, so a rejection is caught before you have sent anything. Simplified (B2C) invoices are reported within 24 hours, so the receipt is already with the customer and the fix is a credit note referencing the original. Every submission attempt, with its response, is kept as an audit trail.

Both, depending on the document. A standard tax invoice to another business must be cleared by ZATCA before you send it. A simplified invoice — a retail receipt to a consumer — is reported to ZATCA within 24 hours of issue. Navira decides which path a document takes from the document type and the buyer, and you do not have to think about it.

No, and that is deliberate — the database itself refuses it. An issued tax invoice is a tax record; it is corrected with a credit or debit note that references the original, which is what both ZATCA and the FTA expect. Drafts remain fully editable until you issue them.

Yes — one login can hold several companies, each with its own VAT number, its own ZATCA device, its own numbering and its own branding, and you switch between them from the sidebar. How many you may hold depends on your plan. Note that each company is separate by design, including in reporting: a single consolidated view across companies is not available yet.

It's Saudi Arabia's mandatory system for issuing tax invoices electronically instead of on paper — most people just call it "Fatoora," after the portal. Phase 1 requires an electronically generated invoice with a QR code; Phase 2 adds a cryptographic stamp, UBL 2.1 XML, and — for invoices between businesses — real-time clearance with ZATCA before the buyer ever sees the document. Navira is built around both phases, not one bolted onto the other.

ZATCA rolls businesses into Phase 2 in waves, based on annual VAT-taxable revenue, and the threshold has been lowered progressively — recent waves reach down to SAR 375,000, the same figure that triggers mandatory VAT registration. ZATCA notifies businesses directly ahead of their wave, but if you're unsure, check your VAT-taxable revenue against the latest published thresholds rather than assume the mandate doesn't reach you yet.

SAR 375,000 in annual taxable supplies makes VAT registration mandatory; SAR 187,500 makes it optional. Crossing 375,000 is also the figure ZATCA has used to pull businesses into e-invoicing Phase 2, so the two obligations tend to land on a growing business at roughly the same time.

A credit or debit note that corrects an issued tax invoice — a return, a price correction, a cancellation — generally has to be issued within 15 calendar days of the event that requires it. It's a hard deadline, not a guideline, and it's easy to miss when the correction is small; Navira keeps that window visible on the invoice it corrects rather than leaving it to memory.

A Compliance CSID is issued during onboarding to prove your invoice format meets ZATCA's technical requirements — it's what you use to pass the six required test documents. A Production CSID is the certificate your system signs real, cleared invoices with once ZATCA approves that testing. Navira requests and renews both as part of setup, not as a separate project you run yourself.

ZATCA can issue fines for e-invoicing non-compliance, and penalties escalate for repeat violations. If you've had a notice or suspect you're already out of scope, the priority is moving onto compliant software and closing the gap — not waiting to see if an audit finds it first.

It depends on your VAT-taxable revenue and which wave that puts you in — the threshold has been lowered over time, most recently down to SAR 375,000, so smaller retailers are increasingly in scope. If you're issuing tax invoices at all, it's worth checking your current wave status rather than assuming the mandate is still years away.

An accounting system. Behind the invoicing there is a double-entry journal, a chart of accounts, bank statement import with automatic matching, expenses, recurring invoices, multi-currency with exchange-rate history, a customer portal, multi-company, and eighteen report sections including a trial balance, a profit and loss and a balance sheet. Invoices post to the ledger automatically — you do not keep two systems in step by hand.

It prepares it, box by box, from your actual invoices and expenses, with a per-document audit trail so you can see exactly which documents produced each figure. You review it and submit it yourself through the authority's own portal. Filing on your behalf would make us your tax agent, which we are not.

There is an API your till can post sales to, with a per-device key you issue and revoke yourself, server-side VAT recalculation, and retry-safe handling so a till that loses connection and resends cannot ring the same sale up twice. There is no off-the-shelf connector for a specific POS vendor — the integration is written against our documented endpoint, which is a day of work rather than a project.

Genuinely bilingual, built from both languages at once rather than English first with Arabic translated in later — invoices, reports, dates and the interface itself all render correctly in Arabic, right-to-left, not as a mirrored English layout with swapped text. It matters whether your team works day to day in Arabic, your auditor wants English, or the same invoice run has to satisfy a local authority and a foreign supplier in the same week.

ZATCA Phase 2 — signing, reporting and clearance — begins on Connect and is standard in every plan above it. Basic covers merchants who don't need Phase 2 yet: pre-wave businesses (Phase 1 QR tax invoices) and non-VAT-registered merchants (plain commercial invoices). When your wave arrives, Connect and above carry full Phase 2.

Every new workspace gets 14 days with no card. When a trial ends nothing is deleted and nothing is locked away: you keep reading, exporting and downloading your documents. Only creating new ones stops until a plan is active.

Your invoices keep issuing. Going over the allowance bills as overage rather than blocking the document — a compliance tool that stops working on the busiest day of your month is worse than useless, because the deadline does not pause with it.

Navira is built Arabic-native rather than English-first with Arabic added on, and — for Saudi merchants specifically — ZATCA Phase 2 is core to the product rather than a bolt-on module. The right answer still depends on your own workflow and volume; it's worth comparing directly against what your business actually needs rather than taking any vendor's word for it, ours included.

We work with accountants, consultants and IT firms who want to bring ZATCA-compliant, bilingual software to their clients. The right arrangement depends on the relationship — a referral fit is different from a full reseller one — so the best next step is getting in touch directly to talk through what fits.

Your data is hosted on enterprise-grade managed cloud infrastructure, encrypted at rest, with strict per-company isolation enforced at the database level. It is held outside Saudi Arabia and the UAE today. An in-Kingdom deployment in Jeddah has been built and rehearsed but holds no data yet — contact us if residency is a requirement and we will talk you through the timeline.

No. Separation is enforced by the database, not by the application: every table carries row-level security scoped to your company, so a request for another company's rows returns nothing even if the application asks for them. That is more than seventy tables and more than two hundred policies, and it is checked automatically on every change.

Yes, at any time and without asking us. Customers, products, invoices, expenses, the journal and your reports all export to CSV, and invoices download as PDF. Where you hold an e-invoicing certificate it is issued to your own tax number and not to Navira, so your cryptographic identity leaves with you too. There is no lock-in contract.