`BR-DEC-02`Document level allowance base amount is written with more than two decimal places

Mutabiq checks Saudi ZATCA Phase 2 e-invoice XML before you submit it: pre-validation against published ZATCA requirements, not an approval by the authority. This page explains one rule, BR-DEC-02.

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The message ZATCA prints

[BR-DEC-02]-The allowed maximum number of decimals for the Document level allowance base amount (BT-93) is 2.

What Mutabiq reports

One entry for each way this rule can be reported.

Reported as: What kind of value was found — empty, not_15_digits and the like — never the value itself.

Document level allowance base amount is written with more than two decimal places

Reported asmore_than_two_decimalsmore than two decimal places

What is wrong

The cbc:BaseAmount of a document level allowance - BT-93, the figure the discount percentage was applied to - carries more than two characters after its first full stop, and ZATCA flags it under EN 16931 rule BR-DEC-02 as a warning, which does not by itself reject the document. The rule counts the characters after the first full stop in the element's text rather than judging the value, so a third digit fails even when it is a nought, and a value written with no full stop at all passes however large it is. An absent or empty element passes as well. This element is optional and exists to show your working, so that a reader can see the percentage and the base producing the discount amount. It is read here only when the allowance is a direct child of the invoice element and its cbc:ChargeIndicator is false; the same element on a line belonged to BR-DEC-25, a rule SDK 3.4.8 no longer reaches. Its two siblings in the block have rules of their own - the discount amount, BT-92, under BR-DEC-01, and the percentage, BT-94, under ZATCA's BR-KSA-DEC-01, which allows six decimals rather than two - so expect to see this finding beside them.

What to check in your ERP

This is the least dangerous of the amounts to reformat and the most often overlooked, because it is context rather than a figure anything else is derived from: nothing in the document has to equal it, so formatting it to two decimals on the way out changes no other number. The usual cause is a subtotal carried straight from the pricing engine or from the order at its stored precision, since nobody thinks to format a field that is only there to explain. If the base amount genuinely is not a two-decimal figure, the honest fix is to drop both the base and the percentage and write the discount amount alone, which the standard permits: a rounded base that no longer produces the discount when multiplied by the percentage misleads the reader more than no base at all would.

The clause that runs

Quoted from the validation-rule stylesheet ZATCA publishes, at the file and line named below. The executed guard is what the check runs; the reported test is what it prints when it fails, and the two are not always the same.

Executed guard

not(string-length(substring-after(cbc:BaseAmount,'.'))<=2)

Reported test

string-length(substring-after(cbc:BaseAmount,'.'))<=2

Evaluated against: /ubl:Invoice/cac:AllowanceCharge[cbc:ChargeIndicator = false()] | /cn:CreditNote/cac:AllowanceCharge[cbc:ChargeIndicator = false()]
Source: vendor/zatca/schematron/CEN-EN16931-UBL.xsl:228
As shipped in ZATCA SDK 3.4.8: the copy quoted here is, byte for byte, the file that release ships. The date in the file name is the name ZATCA gives the file; the rules in it are those of SDK 3.4.8.

A worked example

A synthetic document from the measured test corpus that trips this rule, shown where it differs from one that passed. Mutabiq's report names the class of the value, never the value itself.

Document: bad-86-document-allowance-base-decimals.xml
Mutabiq's verdict: Passed
Reported as: more_than_two_decimalsmore than two decimal places

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