ZATCA has announced Wave 25 of Phase 2 integration, and the revenue threshold is low enough to catch businesses that assumed e-invoicing was a large-company problem. Here is how to tell whether you are included, and what the integration work actually involves.
Saudi Arabia has been rolling out Phase 2 of e-invoicing, the integration phase, in waves since 2023. Each wave reaches a smaller group of businesses than the one before it, and Wave 25, announced in July 2026, is where the threshold becomes low enough to cover a large number of mid-sized companies that had previously watched this from the sidelines.
Are you in scope?
As of August 2026, Wave 25 covers taxpayers whose VAT-subject revenues exceeded SAR 187,500 in any year from 2022 to 2025, with an integration deadline of 1 February 2027. Three details in that sentence matter more than people expect:
- It is any year in the range, not the most recent year. A strong 2022 puts you in scope even if the last two years were quieter.
- It is VAT-subject revenue, not profit and not total turnover across every activity. Check the figure your VAT returns actually report.
- ZATCA notifies taxpayers in each wave directly, but the notification is a courtesy, not the thing that creates the obligation. Waiting to be told is not a plan.
Wave criteria change as ZATCA announces new groups, so confirm your current status rather than relying on an article, including this one. That check takes minutes and it is the first thing any competent partner will do with you.
What Phase 2 integration actually requires
Phase 1 asked businesses to stop issuing handwritten and manually produced invoices and generate them electronically instead. Phase 2 is a different kind of work, because your invoicing system has to talk to ZATCA directly through the Fatoora platform. In practice that means:
- Invoices become structured XML in the required format, not PDFs or printed layouts
- Invoices carry a cryptographic stamp, a UUID and a QR code generated by your system, as applicable to the invoice type and the current ZATCA specification
- Standard invoices, the B2B ones, are cleared by ZATCA before you send them to your customer
- Simplified invoices, the B2C ones, are reported to ZATCA after issue within the required window
- Your system needs a maintained, monitored connection, because a broken integration means invoices stop
What the project looks like in practice
A typical integration runs in five stages, and the technical connection is rarely the part that causes trouble.
- Readiness assessment: confirm your wave and deadline, then check what your current system can and cannot produce
- Data cleanup: fix missing VAT registration numbers, incomplete customer records and inconsistent item data, which is where most delays actually come from
- Build the integration: connect your ERP, accounting system or POS to the platform, including the cryptographic requirements
- Sandbox testing and onboarding: prove the invoices pass before they carry real money
- Go live with monitoring: someone has to notice within minutes, not days, if the connection drops
What delays projects
- Starting late. Deadlines cluster, and integrator capacity gets scarce in the final quarter before a wave date.
- Assuming the ERP vendor has it handled. Ask them for a written commitment on scope and timing, not a reassurance in a meeting.
- Dirty master data. Nothing derails a schedule faster than discovering thousands of customer records with no tax registration number.
- Treating it as an accounting task. It is a systems integration project that happens to be driven by tax rules.
The businesses that struggle with e-invoicing are not the ones with complicated systems. They are the ones that started three weeks before the deadline.
PluginZ builds and integrates e-invoicing connections for companies in Saudi Arabia, including readiness assessment, ERP and POS integration, sandbox testing and post-go-live support. If you want to know which wave applies to you and what the work would involve, we will scope it with you before you commit to anything.
