`BR-DEC-16`Prepaid 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-16.

Validate 5 invoices free

Five checks a month on the Free plan. The file is checked in memory and is never stored.

The message ZATCA prints

[BR-DEC-16]-The allowed maximum number of decimals for the Pre-Paid amount (BT-113) 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.

Prepaid amount is written with more than two decimal places

Reported asmore_than_two_decimalsmore than two decimal places

What is wrong

The cbc:PrepaidAmount in the document totals block - BT-113, the part of this invoice that has already been paid - carries more than two characters after its first full stop, and ZATCA flags it under EN 16931 rule BR-DEC-16 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, and an invoice with nothing paid in advance should simply omit the element rather than write a nought into it. This amount is subtracted from the total with VAT to give the amount due for payment, so a fraction here moves straight into BT-115 and will usually draw BR-DEC-18 in the same run.

What to check in your ERP

This is the one total that does not come from the invoice's own arithmetic, and that is what makes it different from its neighbours in the block: it is fetched from the receipts or the deposits side of the system, or from an advance invoice already issued, so it arrives with the precision that subsystem keeps rather than the precision the invoice writer uses. Look at the field it is read from - a payment gateway's settled amount, a customer deposit balance, or an allocation split across several invoices, where the split is the classic source of a repeating fraction. Where a prepayment covers more than one invoice, allocate rounded amounts that add up to the payment rather than dividing the payment and printing the quotient. If the prepayment was taken in another currency, round after converting, and make sure the converted figure is the one your ledger recognises, because BR-CO-16 will compare it against the payable amount.

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:PrepaidAmount,'.'))<=2)

Reported test

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

Evaluated against: cac:LegalMonetaryTotal
Source: vendor/zatca/schematron/CEN-EN16931-UBL.xsl:540
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-91-prepaid-amount-decimals.xml
Mutabiq's verdict: Passed
Reported as: more_than_two_decimalsmore than two decimal places

Download this example (.xml)Check it in Mutabiq

This page's example, checked by the same rules your own upload goes through. No upload and no sign-in.

Rules evaluated against the same part of the document. One wrong value often reports several of them at once.

Check an invoice

Check your own invoice