409/208 Responses without any duplicates

Clearance and Reporting
1

Hi ZATCA Team,

Since the last month we have receiving periodic 208/409 responses for B2B and B2C documents. Based on the documentation and notices from ZATCA, this indicates that the same hash has been sent to the clearance/reporting portal in the last 24 hours.

I have however never found duplicates in our database where 2 documents share the same hash number, To help with the debugging I have added several logs and audit trails but to no avail. All my investigation has come to is that, the clearance and reporting API from ZATCA returns 208/409 reponses even though no such hash is ever present in the system before the time it was generated.

There is no pattern to this issue, sometimes it does not happen for a whole week, whereas other times it happens once or even twice in day. Requesting some help from the ZATCA team to provide some additional details on this in order close the issue. I am more than happy to share some of the information I have found during the debugging over email if you would like. Please let me know the next steps that can be done in order to proceed with fixing the problem.

2

Hi ZATCA Team,

Can I get a reponse on this?

3

Dear ZATCA Team,

We are still facing this issue at random basis. I have tried investigating this issue on multiple avenues but according my investigation there does not seem to be a scenario where we are sending the invoice with the same hash multiple times. Requesting your help in resolving the matter because clients are concerned about the responses seen.

If it helps what I have noticed is that, generally the Clerance and Reporting endpoints provides us a response within 1-2 seconds. However, documents that have received the 208/409 response took about 30 seconds.

4

Dear @Adithya_Raviraja

Thanks for reaching out,

To provide comprehensive support as usual, can I kindly ask you to share the below through the SP support mail:

  1. What is the exact retry mechanism implemented in your solution?
  2. When was the last time you received a duplicate response? was it for 208 B2B or 409 B2C?
  3. Share your TIN so our technical team can check from our side, and schedule a one-to-one meeting if any clarification is needed.

Note: Kindly share here the email address that you will use to reach out, so our team can check it.

SP mail: sp_support@zatca.gov.sa

Thanks,
Ibrahem Daoud.

5

Hi @idaoud ,

Thank you for responding. My email address is adithyaraviraja@mastersindia.co . I will be responding shortly with all of the necessary information.

6

Hi,

I have sent the email with the requested information. The subject of the email is “Case Number: 9097 “409-208-responses-without-any-duplicates””

7

Hi @idaoud ,
We have been facing this issue at random as mentioned by @Adithya_Raviraja .
Do we have any update on this?

Additional Update,
For some cases, we found that in the first try we received a timeout for the same document from ZATCA endpoints and in the retry we are receiving the 208/409 response.

8

Hi @idaoud ,

Since this is impacting the flow of e-invoicing, so we’d like to confirm:

  • Is there any API or mechanism available to check the processing or acceptance status of an invoice after a timeout?

  • Or any recommended handling for such scenarios to reliably determine invoice status?

Scenario :
On the first submission attempt, we sometimes receive a timeout (occasionally 503) from ZATCA endpoints. When the same document is retried, ZATCA responds with 208/409 – “Invoice Hash Previously Submitted”.

We had also mailed to zatca support regarding this with the mail header - Case Number: 9097 “409-208-responses-without-any-duplicates” but haven’t received any feedback/acknowledgement for the same.

Appreciate your guidance on this.

Regards,

Anand Singh