The advancement in technology is changing the landscape of how the government tax authorities track and reconcile tax invoices. Bahrain’s National Bureau for Revenue has floated a tender through Bahrain Tender Board seeking vendor’s support to design, implement, operate and maintain Bahrain’s E-Invoicing central platform, along with other key technology modules required to enable the rollout of the E-invoicing program in the Kingdom of Bahrain. We expect this solution to be similar to the VAT roll-out phases of e-invoicing (Fatoora) announced by the Saudi Arabia Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA). We foresee e-invoicing in Bahrain shortly, maybe in next 18-24 months.
KSA e-invoicing is being rolled out in two phases. We have covered the KSA e-invoicing phases here.
1. Stop issuing manual invoices. Handwritten invoices and invoices written using text editing tools are not considered e-invoices.
2. Use a compliant electronic invoicing solution that generates e-invoices with the required elements including QR codes.
3. Control access to the electronic billing system by giving access on need to use basis only.
4. Secure their electronic system to ensure no tampering of invoices or logs.
5. Print unique QR code on every tax invoice.
1. Integrate the electronic solution with the NBR portal.
2. Generate tax invoice in a specific format. There would be additional requirements to the current tax formats.
3. Every invoice to be issued usgin SHA 256 algorithm or secure hash algorithm with a digest size of 256 bits.
4. Report invoice and its detail in real-time to the NBR portal.
