E‑Invoicing — Egyptian Tax Authority (ETA)

Overview

Our own e‑invoicing platform integrated with the Egyptian Tax Authority: issuing, signing and submitting documents, status tracking, credit and debit notes, and tax reporting — deployed for six‑plus clients.

01The challenge

E-invoicing is not "send an invoice". The document must be built in exactly the structure the authority accepts: activity codes, item codes, unit types, tax types, unique identifiers and a link to the previous document. One wrong field means a rejection that does not always explain itself.

Harder still, companies do not want to leave their existing systems. The invoice is created in an accounting system or a POS and then has to reach the authority — a solution that requires retyping invoices simply does not get used.

And submission can fail for reasons outside the system — a dropped connection, a temporary rejection, an expired session — and the invoice must not vanish when it does.

02What we built

We modelled the document exactly as the authority does: invoice lines, totals and taxes as separate entities, with reference tables for activity codes, unit types, tax types and non-taxable categories — so validation happens before submission rather than after rejection.

Every document moves through an explicit state path: draft, signed, submitted, then the authority’s final verdict — with the submission UUID and submission ID stored, so any document can be traced to exactly where it stopped. A failure deletes nothing; it leaves the document in its state to be resubmitted.

Because companies do not abandon their systems, we built bulk import from Excel for both invoices and receipts: read, matched against the reference codes, and submitted in one batch. The system also runs several companies on one installation, each with its own API settings and certificates.

03The outcome

A company complies with e-invoicing without changing its accounting system: invoices are exported where they are created and submitted from here.

Every document’s state is visible — accepted, rejected and pending each in its own list with its reason and identifier — so compliance tracking became a screen instead of a manual tracker.