A large conglomerate in Saudi Arabia is now equipped to integrate over 200 million E-invoices per year with ZATCA Phase 2 system

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Business Challenges faced by the customer

We generate millions of invoices per month. How will electronic invoicing work for us?
Will E-invoicing result in any business process changes? Will this impact our business and revenue?
How will we be able to connect hundreds of stores and all other systems with ZATCA? Will this be a huge technical change?
We have a large retail presence across KSA with few retail stores in remote areas with limited internet connectivity. How will E-invoicing integration work?

We generate millions of invoices per month. How will electronic invoicing work for us?
Will E-invoicing result in any business process changes? Will this impact our business and revenue?

Solution

ClearTax was chosen as the preferred E-invoicing solution provider. We engaged with the conglomerate’s multiple ERP/ POS partners and vendors to enable a successful ZATCA integration and bulk E-invoice reporting to ZATCA.

How did we solve it?

The customer wanted to implement a sustainable long term solution and not connect every store/ POS with ZATCA. They wanted to report invoices in a centralized manner and connect with ZATCA from that central server.
ClearTax provided a hybrid solution where Phase 2 QR code and XML is generated inside the POS system (without internet connection) and then all invoices are reported to ZATCA from the central server.

ZATCA’s Turnaround time (TAT) for processing one invoice is ~1 second. Hence, one connection from central server can report ~90-100K invoices per day and would not suffice for the peak demand

Optimized architecture to
support bulk reporting of invoices

In order to support 600K invoices reporting per day, ClearTax designed a solution for bulk reporting of invoices. XML files are transferred from Customer’s central server to ClearTax cloud based E-invoicing platform through Secure File Transfer protocol (SFTP). We designed an architecture with 10+ concurrent connections to ZATCA to report invoices.

Asynchronous reporting

In order to decrease the TAT for reporting, we developed asynchronous reporting connectivity with SFTP based integration. 600K invoices can get reported on a continuous basis without waiting for the ZATCA acknowledgement. ClearTax platform also provided bulk status check APIs to get status of ZATCA acknowledgement in case of asynchronous reporting.

Auto-scale of infrastructure

ClearTax cloud infrastructure was scaled to handle 100 TPS (transactions per second) to ensure 24 hours reporting SLA. The cloud platform is designed to autoscale during the peak seasons.

Large scale archival as per ZATCA regulations

For 200M invoices per year, ~10TB storage is required on primary and DR sites. In Year 2, the archival will happen for the current year and past year invoices increasing the storage capacity to ~20 TB. ClearTax cloud platform provided 6 years of historical archival to the customer. The archival is optimized with hot/ cold storage based retrieval.

Automatic retries in case of issues

In very rare scenarios when the requests on ZATCA servers timeout or ZATCA servers are unavailable, ClearTax cloud platform developed auto retry logics to report invoices ZATCA. This helped customers get comfortable that the invoices are getting reported to ZATCA within 24 hours, with multiple retries in case of connectivity issues.

Centralized XML correction dashboard

ClearTax cloud platform provided dashboards and reports to view success/failure reporting status of each invoice. The platform also provided features to modify failed XML files and resubmit to ZATCA - without going back to original POS system

Enterprise grade security

ClearTax cloud platform is hosted inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and complies with the data residency requirements by the government. The platform provides enterprise grade security and is compliant as per ISO and SOC2 certifications.

Key impact created by ClearTax solution

The customer saved 3-4 months of development efforts across all different systems with the help of technical and functional consultation provided by ClearTax experts
ClearTax helped the customer to set up internal processes to correct failed invoices and achieve compliance as per ZATCA requirements
The end-to-end solution will help achieve compliance to 24 hours reporting SLA for 200M invoices generated per year.
Customer developed a scalable solution (considering the peak seasons and next 5 years’ growth plan) to comply with ZATCA requirements.

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