Inquiry Regarding Handling Unstable Platform Responses and Compliance Alignment
Dear ZATCA Team,
We have recently been facing a complex challenge caused by intermittent instability in the Fatoora platform.
For example, on 10 April 2015, the platform returned an empty response during the clearance of a tax invoice. Our system interpreted this as an unexpected error and automatically voided the affected invoices. However, from ZATCA’s perspective, these invoices were actually cleared and treated as valid tax invoices.
In another scenario, the platform returned a 500 status code. Our system interpreted this as a clearance failure, but we later discovered that the affected invoices had, in fact, been successfully cleared.
We already rely on a retry mechanism with a fixed number of attempts and a predefined delay, but it appears that this is not sufficient to handle the intermittent response issues.
Our Proposed Approach
We plan to adopt the following enhanced mechanism:
- Maintain retry attempts with a fixed delay.
- Regardless of the response, invoices will be stored in the system except when the invoice is explicitly REJECTED.
- If the clearance result is uncertain, the invoice will not be printed or shared with the buyer.
- We will still extract and store the following:
- Invoice Hash
- ICV
- IRN
The stored Invoice Hash will be treated as the PIH for the next invoice.
ICV and IRN will increment accordingly (ICV+1, IRN+1).
Accounting Impact
Such invoices will still affect:
- Inventory
- Accounting ledgers
- VAT reporting
- Customer statements
The system will continue attempting to clear the invoice in the background. Once clearance is confirmed, the invoice will be shared with the buyer automatically.
Background & Observations
We have processed over 150 million invoices for more than 2,600 taxpayers.
We closely monitor all scenarios, and we have never had a single rejected invoice, thanks to the reliability of our local validation layer.
Request for Guidance
We would like to confirm whether the above mechanism aligns with ZATCA compliance guidelines or conflicts with any existing rules.
We kindly request guidance from the ZATCA team and from the community on best practices to overcome these recurring issues caused by intermittent platform responses.
Thank you for your support.