Your 90-day free trial: what to do in the first weeks

Sign up with a work email address; no credit card is needed to start. You will receive a verification email, and once you confirm it, Fatooraz creates your workspace, which is the private space that holds your company's data. Use the email of the person who will own the account, usually the owner or the finance manager, since that person will most likely manage the subscription later.

Treat the trial as a rehearsal of your real routine, not a tour of screens. Decide in advance what you want to learn: whether invoices look right in Arabic and English, whether your accountant is comfortable with the VAT reports, whether a cashier can close a shift. A short list of questions keeps the 90 days from slipping away.

Start with the company profile, because it feeds every document: the legal name in Arabic and English, address, VAT registration number and logo. Mistakes here appear on every invoice later. Then add a handful of real customers, including business customers with their VAT numbers, so you can see how standard invoices differ from consumer ones.

Next, add the items and services you actually sell, with prices and the correct VAT treatment, and set up payment terms such as immediate, 15 days or 30 days for customers who pay later. A few dozen items are enough to start; add the rest once you are confident. A short, realistic catalogue teaches you more than a long, rushed one.

Your trial workspace is connected to ZATCA's simulation environment, which is separate from production. That means no real invoices exist in a trial workspace: everything you issue is practice, with no tax effect. Use that freedom to try situations that would be stressful with a real customer, including mistakes and corrections.

Issue a standard tax invoice to a business customer and a simplified invoice to a consumer, then correct one with a credit note, record a partial payment and check that the invoice shows as partly paid with its remaining balance. Ask your accountant to look at the VAT report. The point is to see your own documents in Arabic and English, not generic samples. Note anything that needs fixing before you subscribe.

• A standard tax invoice to a business customer, with a payment term
• A simplified tax invoice with a QR code for a consumer sale
• A credit note against an invoice, then a debit note for an extra charge
• A partial payment, then the open invoices list filtered by that customer
• A VAT report reviewed by your accountant

If you run a shop, cafe or other counter business, test the POS, which is part of the Business plan. Run a complete shift: open a session, sell by scanning barcodes, take a split payment, print an Arabic receipt and close the session at the end. Let a real cashier do it rather than you, because speed and clarity matter more than a long feature list.

Then invite the people who will use the system: the accountant, the cashier, the sales staff. Give everyone their own login instead of sharing one. The number of users depends on the plan, so check the plan details before inviting your whole team and decide who truly needs access during the trial. After a week, ask each user what slowed them down and what they liked.

Go back to the questions you wrote on day one and answer each with evidence from the trial. Were the invoices correct and readable? Did the accountant accept the VAT report? Did the cashier close a shift without help? Count the people who need to log in and choose the plan accordingly: Starter covers invoicing, billing and e-invoicing, and Business adds the POS.

Prices exclude VAT, so factor that in when you compare. Do not leave the decision to the last day; aim to decide about a week before the end, so that subscribing, onboarding with ZATCA and training the team are not squeezed into a single afternoon. If the product does not fit, saying no is a perfectly good outcome, and the next section explains what happens.

Production e-invoicing is not part of the trial. It is enabled after you subscribe and complete ZATCA onboarding, where you generate an OTP in the Fatoora portal and Fatooraz guides you through the rest. Until then nothing you issued is a real tax invoice. As always, check ZATCA's latest announcements and ask your accountant about your wave and its dates.

If you do not subscribe, the workspace is suspended and your data is kept for 30 days, so you can still subscribe or export what you need. After that period it is archived securely and then deleted according to the retention policy. If you are unsure, subscribe or export before the 30-day period runs out; nothing is archived or deleted before then.