Stay updated with all the latest
upgrades from ClearTax E-invoicing

• Users can now download archive XMLs from the 'Archives' section. This is an additional option alongside existing reports.
  

• This feature allows the retrieval of Signed XMLs used for E-Invoice generation from all sources, including store-generated offline invoice XMLs, with a one-day-at-a-time download limit to accommodate large volumes of both standard (B2B) and simplified (B2C) tax invoices.
  
• The downloaded zip file organizes data into multiple folders for each branch/store on the ClearTax E-Invoicing platform.
  

• Fixed the issue of incorrect unique identifier used while generating an edited invoice from web portal. This eliminates duplicate copies of the same invoice on the web portal and avoids confusion.
  

• Custom fields sent through the API will now be included in the E-Invoice payload when the invoice is edited and regenerated from the web UI.
  

• Values forming the ‘Tax subtotals’ object are now validated at an aggregate level corresponding to each tax category codes against the aggregate value computed for the same tax category code from the line items. This is done to enable users to pass multiple 'Tax subtotal’ object for the same tax category codes.
  

• The web portal now shows numbers in universally recognized comma-separated format, enhancing readability
  

• If a failed invoice is retried without correction, a new error message indicating duplication is returned. Also, the original error messages are now shown alongside to aid users in correcting validation errors effectively.
  

• Validations for improved experience:
  

• Relaxed validation on buyer country code for all invoices in line with ZATCA update. Now export invoices with country code ‘SA’ can be generated
  
• Added a validation to prevent the generation of another document with the same document number in the same financial number irrespective of the type i.e. invoice/credit/debit note/prepayment receipt
  

• Print PDFs can now be generated or converted using the APIs for prepayment or advance invoices
  

• Updates to the ICV generation logic
  

• For all cases where there is a genuine validation error from ZATCA which is corrected then a new ICV will be assigned otherwise the same ICV will be used
  
• In case of retriable errors or if the ZATCA server has issues, or if there are validation errors from Clear, then a new ICV will not be assigned
  

• Increased the number of digits that are accepted in the invoiced quantity field to avoid conversion of the value to scientific format
  

• Fixed issues in all CSV reports where error messages are not populated correctly for failed invoices
  

ClearTax E-Invoice utility for POS systems: Generate ZATCA compliant E-Invoice from anywhere without the requirement of continuous internet connection

A truly offline utility that functions without internet to validate your invoice data, add mandatory fields and generates a ZATCA compliant E-Invoice with signed QR code that can be readily shared with the buyers on the spot. This offline utility is compatible with any POS system and can be installed easily to register devices to generate E-Invoices and also to generate E-Invoices itself. Accepts input data directly from the POS system and enriches it to make it a buyer sharable compliant E-Invoice. Reporting can be done to the government systems subsequently via a file upload strategy. All the E-Invoices generated would be visible on the ClearTax web portal and reports/corrections can also be made if required.

More Improvements and fixes:

• Added support to print/generate PDF for prepayment invoices
  
• Added support to convert normal PDF to ZATCA compliant PDF/A-3 invoices for type prepayment invoices
  
• Now force retry is accepted for invoices that are in ‘Pending’ status due to ZATCA server being unresponsive. Retry happens from our cron every 1 hour but in case a taxpayer retries a pending invoice then it will be attempted immediately
  
• Updated the ICV logic for invoices that are failed by ZATCA with a blank error message. New ICV will not be generated and the previous one will be reused during subsequent reattempts
  
• Updated the logic of business hierarchy API calls to handle 4040 errors in async E-Invoice generate calls
  
• Updated the error message for cases where ZATCA error message is blank or in a different format so that no error messages in the response or reports is blank
  

Be audit ready: Archive and store all your E-Invoices at a single place

As per ZATCA regulations, E-Invoicing data should be stored and archived by taxpayers for a period of six years plus one year which includes the financial year to which the document belongs to. Now, ClearTax offers you the option to easily access all the stored data which is older than 365 days from the new 'Archives' section. Access lite, detailed and offline reports from the archives page while pdf with embedded xmls can be accessed in the upcoming release.

In case you have not yet opted for the data storage option then do it from the option available in the archives page or reach out to your account manager.

More Improvements and fixes:

• Updated the ZATCA SDK to the latest version 3.2.6
  
• New feedback module to capture the user’s experience with major flows within the E-Invoice product
  
• Updated the QR Code generation step to match the timestamp in QR Code with the Invoice Issue time in XML which has to be in KSA local time
  
• Detecting the branch code or store code from the filename of xmls
  

Features:

• Emails triggered to your buyer to share E-Invoice copy after generation will have attachments instead of download link for size less than 18 mb. For attachments larger than 18 mb it will continue to be a download link
  

• Attachments don’t have expiry and can be downloaded anytime
  
• The content of the email is updated for easy understanding
  

• New print template with support for all additional fields related to advance/adjustment invoices and payable rounding amount has been created
  

Enhancements:

• Requirement of ‘Instruction note’ while raising credit/debit note has been enforced
  
• All advance invoices with invoice type code ‘386’ are renamed as 'Prepayment Receipt'
  

• One of either Buyer VAT or other buyer ID is required to generate standard tax invoice in phase 1 a well as per the VAT regulations
  
• Modified validation on Supply end date, where supply end date can be same as supply start date
  

Bug Fixes:

• Picking and displaying VAT breakdown in case of multiple VAT categories in the invoice
  
• Returning correct error message in case the prepared xml from user input data is greater than 10 mb as this is not accepted by ZATCA
  
• Updated the logic of QR code generation for phase 1 invoices in which trailing zeros were added to 2 fields when scanned from the VAT application. Updated result
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your overall experience. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use. Value-added features like auto-retry, email APIs with external domains can be activated for your license to alleviate the E-Invoice experience.
In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

• Configurable auto-retry for specific ZATCA failures that can be retried
  

• These failures happen when ZATCA systems are slow or load is high
  
• In case of such failures with random error message ClearTax will retry 5 times
  
• This is a paid value-added feature & can be enabled by your account manager
  

• Creation of advance and adjustment invoices now possible through excel data upload
  
• Payable rounding amount in the detailed view of the invoice
  

Enhancements:

• Additional fields in the E-Inv detailed report
  

• Essential Fields - ICV, PIH and UUID
  
• Error and Warning Summary - Giving details at an invoice level
  
• Fields related to advance and adjustment invoices
  

• Updated the filter behaviour to only display selections made after ‘Apply Filters’ button is clicked. Also, clicking the ‘Filter’ button opens or closes the filter options
  

• The icon in the complete summary view is updated to the store invoices icon
  

• Updated error message for detailed and lite report downloads for more than 500k invoices which is not supported currently
  

Bug Fixes:

• Now you can search by branch name in the business hierarchy dropdown
  

• The table in MIS dashboard displays the correct numbers in case of branch selection
  

• Editing and correcting mistakes in multiple fields from web view of invoice is now fixed for payment means code, charge indicator and custom fields at line level
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your experience on the portal. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use. Value-added features like auto-retry, email APIs with external domains can be activated for your license to alleviate the E-Invoice experience. In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

• Support for sharing E-Invoices from enterprise/company hosted email servers or domains
  

• Users can configure their email servers and trigger email notifications of E-Invoices generated on ClearTax
  
• The emails would contain the details of the enterprise and all responses would go to the selected mailboxes making it efficient communication between the seller and buyer and fulfill compliance requirements as all standard tax invoices have to be shared in PDF/A-3 format with the buyer
  

Enhancements:

• Additional VAT exemption reason codes and reasons have been added for VAT category codes ‘Z’ (zero-rated)and ‘O’ (Out of scope). The added reason codes are:
  

•  VAT exemption reason code for ‘Z’ - VATEX-SA-MLTRY
  
• VAT exemption reason - supply of qualified military goods
  
• VAT exemption reason code for ‘O’ - VATEX-SA-OOS
  
• VAT exemption reason - Any free text up to 127 characters
  

Bug Fixes:

• As per the latest release from ZATCA, exact values are expected in ‘TaxExclusiveAmount’ and ‘TaxInclusiveAmount’ fields. Earlier a deviation of 0.01 was accepted without warnings which now leads to errors.
  

• Calculations have been revamped to always be exact match with zero tolerance
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your overall experience. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use.
In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

• New GetBulk Lite API to fetch latest E-Invoice status of invoices from database. The API would support 500 invoices in one call and 10 parallel calls
  
• Sending both Arabic and English values in xml to ZATCA/government wherever applicable and available. Arabic value is mandatory for those fields which will be displayed on the face of the invoices. The format in which they would be sent: 
  

• <cbc>:Tagname> Arabic | English</cbc:Tagname>
  
• Ex: <cbc:CityName> الدمام | Dammam</cbc:CityName>
  

Enhancements:

• Improved the auto-scaling feature of folders and pods for xml FTP processing to support larger volume per hour
  
• Added retry capability based on configuration and modified the processing logic based on datetime of file picking in xml FTP to make it near FIFO. This will reduce the time required for processing
  
• Updated the percentage calculation logic on ‘Dashboard’ page to include offline generated document count as well
  

Updated ‘Dashboard’ page with corrected percentage calculations

• Suppressing the json output in the xml FTP output section on demand to reduce load and improve performance of FTP servers
  
• Increased the number of custom fields at line item level from six to to ten in order to provide more flexibility with E-Invoice creation
  
• Added capability to process more than 5,000 invoices per excel/csv file imported via FTP method
  
• Improvements in analytics tracking for tracking usage and success rate for all modes
  

Bug Fixes:

• Not allowing upload of data to generate E-Invoices with a suitable error message in case of license expiry
  
• Updated the percentage calculation logic on ‘Dashboard’ page to include offline generated document count as well
  
• Billing reference id and reason for issuance of credit/debit note which was not getting populated in Lite report has been added
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your experience on the portal. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use.
In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

• New complete summary view of all documents has been introduced to help with analytics and reconciliation with source
  

• The complete summary shows all the documents generated for a business entity for the selected time period
  
• The breakdown is present by E-invoice status as well as online and store generated invoices
  
• Specifically ‘Discarded’ invoices are excluded from the total to avoid double counting as these are the copy of edited invoices
  

Complete Invoice summary that can be accessed from the ‘Documents’ page

Additional filter of ‘Method of Generation’ is available on the ‘Documents’ page to help differentiate between invoices generated from online devices vs. those generated from stores

Enhancements:

• Relaxed the validation of duplicate check on documents for certain error codes of ZATCA. It has been observed that these documents get successful upon retry and the validation relaxation has been done to enable retries
  

• Pending and Discarded E-invoice status are now included in the summary on the Documents page for completeness. Specifically ‘Discarded’ invoices are excluded from the total to avoid double counting as these are the copy of edited invoices
  

• Offline invoices count is now included in the Dashboard view
  
• Sending zero in place of null or empty values for allowance charge or price fields which are mandatory for a few scenarios to improve success rate of generation
  

Bug Fixes:

• A valid error message will be returned in case number of  line items in the invoice generation payload instead of status code 500
  
• Saving values of VAT category tax amount in the edit invoice flow has been fixed
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your experience on the portal. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use.
In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

• Improved load time and presentation of the Documents page with new filter view and table view of invoices
  
• Support for new field ‘Payable Rounding Amount’ to account for halala differences in invoice level calculations
  
• Documents in the list view will be sorted with latest at the top
  
• Improved performance on the MIS dashboard page with new filters and optimisations
  

Revamped Documents page with new table and filters

Updated MIS dashboard page with new filter view

Enhancements:

• Updated validations as per the new ZATCA update:
  

• Allowing country code other than SA in buyer details of simplified non-export invoices
  
• Additional building number is now optional in both buyer and seller address
  
• State/Province code or country subentity field is now optional in both buyer and seller address
  
• Sending 0 in line level allowance charge amount in case of null value to avoid failures from ZATCA
  
• Seller or buyer postal code cannot start with 0 if country code is 'SA'
  
• Item gross price will be printed with 2 decimal places always instead of one
  

• Entire object of postal address is now optional for all invoices in seller and buyer details. Postal address contains: Street, Building number, City, Postal code, Province/State, District, Country code
  
• Updated the SDK version to the latest one of 3.2.1
  
• Updated enums for ‘Allowance charge reason code’ field as per ZATCA
  

Bug Fixes:

• Optimised report downloads by suppressing multiple API calls triggered upon action
  
• Fixed the issue of counts not loading on the dashboard in some instances
  
• Fixed an issue of new user invitation flow running in loop for invited users
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your experience on the portal. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use.In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

• Reporting device for signed XMLs will be picked automatically in case device information is not provided in E-invoice generation at store level
  
• Get the status and all information of invoices in bulk from multiple sources through Get Bulk API. 
  

Enhancements:

• Device information is now available in Detailed View of invoices for usage and corrections if any
  
• Lengthy numeric fields in the csv reports have an escape character to prevent conversion to scientific format. This improves usability of the reports in any tool
  

Bug Fixes:

• Bar chart in the MIS report is ordered in ascending order for easier data visualization.
  
• Accepting input of multiple payment means code for export credit notes
  

Apart from the above, some minor bug fixes have been made to improve your experience on the portal. All the above features, updates, and enhancements are available on sandbox and production for your use.In case you need more assistance or information, kindly reach out to your account manager or email us at ksa-support@cleartax.in.

Features:

Invoice Summary Report

• Invoice summary level reports are now available at MIS Dashboard under Reports section - which will allow consuming daily count and VAT amount of invoices enabling faster reconciliation & filing.
  
• Report Download scope can be selected through filters on MIS Dashboard and is exportable in CSV format.
  
• Last 5 generated reports are available in logs which can be accessed at any point of time with no delay in report compilation.
  

Enhancements:

Updated Lite Report

• Additional fields specific to Online or B2C Offline mode of E-invoice generation - have been added
  
• Report fields have been organized as per the categories present and similar fields have been grouped together for better usability
  

Store information capture

• For offline XML reporting users, store names can be captured when included with XML file names. This can be used to segregate invoice data on store level in future. It will further help with reconciliation for offline invoices too.
  

Features:

New report for all invoices generated from stores/billing counters

• A report of all the invoices generated from stores/billing counters is available for download from the ‘Documents’ page
  
• The report will contain both successful and failed invoices from stores
  
• This report is specifically for offline invoices where signing is done at the store
  
• The report will be downloaded for the time period selected on the page
  

‘Starts with’ search on document number

• Now you can do a ‘Starts with’ search on ‘Document Number’
  
• All invoices or documents starting with the characters mentioned in the text input will be fetched and displayed on screen
  
• This will help in searching invoices or documents easily based on invoice series
  
• You can refine the search results by adding more characters to the search and press ‘Enter’
  
• The search results will not include invoices successfully generated by stores and can be checked from the separate offline report
  

Attempted datetime for all e-Invoices and its usage

• Attempted datetime is now available for all invoices and documents
  
• For generated invoices ‘Attempted Datetime’ refers to the time at which the invoice is generated
  
• For invoices in other statuses ‘Attempted Datetime’ refers to the time at which the invoice is last updated
  

Enhancements:

Handling duplicate invoice reattempts via different modes

• Duplicate invoices are not validated by ZATCA and directly accepted which will lead to double tax liability for the same invoice
  
• ClearTax already validated all invoices generated through online method and throw an error in case a successful invoice is tried again
  
• This has been extended to cover both online and offline modes
  
• ClearTax will now validate all invoices irrespective of the source and throw an error if a successful or in process invoice exists in the system
  
• Also if an already failed invoice with validation errors is retried without any changes then it would not be sent to ZATCA as it would fail again
  

Accepting dates in yyyymmdd format

• Now you can send dates in yyyymmdd format. This is to let users upload date fields easily without separators and errors
  
• Please convert the date field to string in the excel file before uploading to keep the formatting intact. Example: 10/04/2023 → 20230410
  

Bug Fixes:

Updated thumbnails for default templates

• The thumbnails in the print preview for the default templates have been updated to reflect the correct invoice type
  
• The updates are only for template 39 and 40
  

Features:

Sorting devices in the ‘Device Settings’ page basis attempted time

• Devices in the ‘Device Settings’ page would be sorted on the basis of the time at which the device registration was attempted
  
• Sorting would be applicable for devices in all statuses
  
• This would help users understand when a particular device was registered for ease of use
  

API to add VATs and branches in the business hierarchy

• VATs and branches can be added directly into your ClearTax account via APIs
  
• This will help marketplaces and distributors to setup new businesses for e-Invoicing quickly in their systems without using the web portal
  

Enhancements:

Updated Device registration process

• Updates and modifications to device registration process to improve the success rate of device registration
  
• Trimming leading and trailing spaces in text fields which are not accepted by ZATCA
  
• Not accepting special characters (~!@#$%^&*()+<>?/) as per ZATCA mandates
  
• Updated sample XMLs based on the latest guidelines
  

Updated Detailed Report (Excel)

• More informative and structured detailed report is now available for use
  
• Includes additional fields specific to Phase 2
  
• Includes more fields in Arabic wherever applicable
  
• Organized fields as per the categories and grouped similar fields together for better usability
  
• Added attempted datetime and method of generation fields to the report
  

Updated summary counts on the 'Documents' page

• Excluded ‘Discarded’ invoices from the total count so that there is no mismatch
  

Bug Fixes:

Workspace Component update for all pages

• Fixed issue of workspace switcher overlapping with help section
  

Support for export transactions with different accounting and invoice currency

• 2 additional fields are not required anymore to support export transactions with different accounting and invoice currency
  
• Now export transactions will be processed similar to normal transactions without any requirement of any special or additional information