`BR-DEC-19`VAT category taxable 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-19.

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-19]-The allowed maximum number of decimals for the VAT category taxable amount (BT-116) 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.

VAT category taxable amount is written with more than two decimal places

Reported asmore_than_two_decimalsmore than two decimal places

What is wrong

A cbc:TaxableAmount in a VAT breakdown - BT-116, the total that a single VAT category applies to - carries more than two characters after its first full stop, and ZATCA flags it under EN 16931 rule BR-DEC-19 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. The breakdown is a cac:TaxSubtotal inside a cac:TaxTotal, one per VAT category the invoice uses - the standard rate, zero-rated, exempt and out of scope each get their own - so this finding names one of them and not necessarily all. Its sibling in the same breakdown, the category VAT amount BT-117, is checked by BR-DEC-20, and the two are commonly reported together because they are usually produced by the same summary routine.

What to check in your ERP

This is a per-category sum over the invoice lines, so the extra digits are almost always coming up from the lines rather than being introduced here. Round each line net amount to two decimals first, group the rounded values by VAT category and sum them, and write that sum here. A sum taken over unrounded line values will not only fail this rule but will also disagree with the lines themselves once the lines are printed. Check where the grouping happens: a tax engine that returns a taxable base per category at its own precision, independent of the line amounts on the invoice, is the common shape, and its answer should be re-derived from the printed lines rather than trusted. Check as well that document level allowances and charges are being applied to a category as rounded amounts, because that adjustment is the other place a fraction enters this figure.

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

Reported test

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

Evaluated against: /ubl:Invoice/cac:TaxTotal/cac:TaxSubtotal
Source: vendor/zatca/schematron/CEN-EN16931-UBL.xsl:1295
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-93-category-taxable-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