ZATCA
A ZATCA Phase 1 checklist you can actually check
Six things an invoice must carry, what each one is for, and how to tell whether yours has them.
Published 20 Sep 2026 · 2 min read
Phase 1 is a short list, and most of the confusion around it comes from the list being described rather than shown. An invoice needs the seller's name in Arabic, the seller's VAT number, the invoice date and time, the total with VAT shown separately, and a QR code encoding those fields.
The QR is the part people get wrong, because it looks decorative and is not. It is a TLV-encoded payload, and a reader that fails to parse it fails silently — the picture is still a picture. The only honest test is to scan a printed invoice with the ZATCA app on a real phone and read what comes back.
What Phase 1 does NOT require is clearance: you are not calling ZATCA per invoice yet. That is Phase 2, and it is a different piece of work with certificates, an onboarding flow and a sandbox. If a vendor tells you Phase 1 compliance means you are done, ask them which of the two they mean.
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