Saudi buyer address incomplete on the invoice

What does this mean?

The condition hangs on the buyer country code (BT-55). When it is SA, the buyer address must carry the street name (BT-50), the building number (KSA-18), the postal code (BT-53), the city (BT-52), the district (KSA-4) and the country code itself. All of them live inside cac:AccountingCustomerParty/cac:Party/cac:PostalAddress: cbc:StreetName, cbc:BuildingNumber, cbc:PostalZone, cbc:CityName, cbc:CitySubdivisionName and cac:Country/cbc:IdentificationCode. They are the same six that BR-KSA-09 asks of the seller address.

A neighbouring rule is easy to mix up with it. BR-KSA-10, also a warning, asks for three elements only — street, city and country code — on a tax invoice and its notes, whatever the buyer country, and its text excludes simplified invoices. This one asks for six, looks only at a Saudi buyer, and names no document family: what triggers it is the country code on the buyer address. A simplified invoice normally carries no buyer address and so never meets it, but by the wording of the rule a simplified invoice that does carry a partial Saudi address falls under the same condition.

One practical consequence: a buyer with no address in the file at all carries no country code, so by its wording this rule has nothing to test, and the rule that speaks to a missing buyer address on a tax invoice is BR-KSA-10. A partial address that does carry SA — a street and a city with no district and no postal code — is exactly the case this rule describes.

It is a warning: the Authority clears the invoice and returns the warning alongside that acceptance, so no sale is held up by a postal code nobody has to hand. But accepted is not the same as complete. The rule calls these elements mandatory, a document without them stays that way in your records and in your customer's, and it is the kind of gap a buyer's accounts team, or whoever reviews your books, may ask about. The same warning also comes back on every invoice to that customer for as long as their record is unchanged.

Why does it happen?

Ordered from the most common to the least — your cause is most likely the first or the second.

• A customer record created from an email, a purchase order or a signature block that holds a street and a city and nothing else — no building number, no district, no postal code.
• The district missing because most commercial documents never mention it, or filled with the city name to silence the warning — which makes the document state a district that is not the buyer's.
• The whole address typed as one line into the street field: cbc:StreetName is full and every other element is absent.
• A shipping address from an online store copied across as it is: a free-form delivery address rather than a national address, with no building number or district in fields of their own.
• The country code defaulted to SA on every customer, so a buyer abroad, with an address written the way their own country writes it, is judged by the national address rules.
• Customers imported from a spreadsheet with no district or building number column, or with columns that were dropped in the mapping.

How to fix it

3 steps, then send the invoice again.

1. 1
   Ask for the national address, not just an address

   Ask the customer for their national short address — four letters then four digits — or their national address certificate; the six elements come out of either in full. It is quicker than chasing each element separately, and more reliable than copying an address off a letterhead. The buyer fields, and the rule behind each, are listed in the tax invoice requirements checklist.

2. 2
   One element per field, and no filler

   Write each part into its own element inside cac:PostalAddress. Do not silence the warning with a value that does not describe the customer — a dash, zeros, or the city name in the district: the document then states something untrue, and the warning was the more honest of the two. An element whose value you do not have is better left out than sent empty, because an empty element falls under the field-length rules, whose minimum is one character — BR-KSA-F-06-C28 for the district, for example.

3. 3
   Correct the customer record, then check the neighbours

   The invoice that carried the warning was cleared and does not need reissuing to stand; correct the address in the customer record and their next invoices go out clean. In the same pass: a Saudi buyer postal code is five digits under BR-KSA-67 — the four-digit additional number written in its place is the usual cause — and the country code is the two-letter ISO code SA, not KSA.

This code does not block acceptance, so the invoice you have is compliant. Correct the data so the warnings disappear from future invoices.

Frequently asked questions