For contractors working in Saudi Arabia, ZATCA e-invoicing is no longer something to plan for later. The Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority has been bringing VAT-registered businesses into its integration phase in waves, and each wave reaches further down into smaller companies. A contractor running projects in both the UAE and KSA now has two e-invoicing regimes to meet.
ZATCA e-invoicing requires taxpayers to issue invoices and credit and debit notes electronically in a structured format and, in its second phase, to connect their invoicing systems to ZATCA so invoices are transmitted to the authority. For contractors with progress billing and high invoice volumes, that changes how the whole billing process has to run.
The deadline is set by ZATCA, not by when the finance team is ready.
Phase one took effect in December 2021 and required businesses to generate e-invoices. Phase two, the integration phase, took effect on 1 January 2023 and is being rolled out in waves based on taxable turnover. EY’s summary of the 23rd wave shows how far down the thresholds have reached: resident taxpayers with taxable turnover above SAR 750,000 in 2022, 2023 or 2024 had to integrate between 1 January and 31 March 2026.
ZATCA has continued to announce further waves and notifies affected taxpayers directly. Any contractor registered for VAT in KSA should assume integration is either already required or coming soon, and confirm its own wave and deadline with ZATCA or a tax adviser.
Most e-invoicing guidance is written for simple sales. Construction billing is not simple. Progress invoices are based on certified valuations. Retention is deducted and released later. Advance payments are recovered in instalments. Variations and contra charges create credit and debit notes throughout the project.
Each of those has to be issued correctly and transmitted in the required format. If invoicing lives in a separate tool from the commercial records, someone ends up re-entering certified values by hand, which is the duplication we described in why construction teams enter the same data three times.
Contractors working in both countries also face the UAE’s own programme, which we covered in UAE e-invoicing for construction companies. Two regimes, two sets of rules and two sets of deadlines, often run by the same finance team.
Start with the basics. Confirm the company’s taxable turnover and which wave it falls into. Check whether the current accounting or ERP system can produce compliant e-invoices and connect to ZATCA. Map every billing scenario the business uses, from progress invoices to retention release, and test that each one produces a valid document.
Then look at the process around it. Who approves an invoice before it is issued, how corrections are handled once an invoice is transmitted, and where the record lives for audit. Answering those questions under deadline pressure is far harder than answering them early.
The integration waves apply to taxpayers resident in Saudi Arabia for VAT purposes. A contractor operating in KSA through a registered entity or branch should check its status and wave with ZATCA or a Saudi tax adviser, since obligations depend on registration and turnover.
ZATCA can apply penalties for non-compliance with e-invoicing requirements, and the consequences depend on the violation. The safer course is to confirm the deadline early and test the integration well before it.
It can, if the system supports both authorities’ formats and integration requirements. Many contractors find it simpler to run invoicing from the same platform that holds their projects, valuations and contracts in both countries.
The fix is generating invoices directly from certified valuations, retention and variation records, rather than retyping them into a separate tool. No re-keying, fewer errors, and a clear trail from site progress to issued invoice.
That is what construction ERP looks like when it is built for the Gulf. Mismar works with contractors across UAE and KSA to run project billing from the same record as the project itself. If your KSA wave is coming and your invoicing still runs on spreadsheets, let’s get on a call.
Start growing with Mismar today.
