Every taxpayer registered with the Egyptian Tax Authority (ETA) must issue e-invoices under Minister of Finance Decree 323 of 2022, and the ETA announced that the mandate was complete on 15 December 2022. Your Egyptian entity needs an eSeal certificate, approved codes for every item, and a system that submits signed documents to the ETA. This guide covers each step, how the integration works, and the errors that most often get invoices rejected. Every regulatory statement comes from the ETA's website or its official SDK, reviewed on 19 October 2026.
What counts as an e-invoice in Egypt
An Egyptian e-invoice is a structured JSON or XML document, signed with the issuer's eSeal and submitted to the ETA, which validates it and assigns it a unique ID. A PDF emailed to a customer is not an e-invoice in this sense.
The e-invoicing system covers invoices, credit notes, debit notes, and export invoices and notes. Sales to consumers go through a separate e-receipt system, covered below.
Who must comply, and since when
- The rollout started with decision 386/2020, which named 134 companies, then 518/2020 (347 companies), and continued through decisions 85, 195, 443 and 619 of 2021 and 208 and 323 of 2022, the last being phase eight.
- The ETA's joining-conditions page states that Decree 323 of 2022 obliges all taxpayers registered with the ETA to join the system.
- The ETA announced that the mandate covered all taxpayers registered at its tax offices in every governorate by 15 December 2022.
- From 1 April 2023, the ETA said it would recognise only electronic invoices for VAT deduction and refund, and for costs claimed in the tax return. In practice, a supplier's paper invoice stops helping your tax position.
- The only exception the ETA lists is certain sovereign bodies covered by exemption decisions.
To check a specific entity, use the ETA's official inquiry page with its tax registration number.
E-invoice vs e-receipt
| E-invoice | E-receipt | |
|---|---|---|
| Covers | Transactions between companies and establishments, and sales to government bodies | Transactions between a taxpayer and the final consumer |
| Issued from | ERP or accounting system | Point of sale |
| When it applies | All taxpayers, Decree 323/2022 | By ETA chairman decision, in separate phases under Decree 230/2022 |
| Prerequisite | eSeal, item codes, integration | Already registered on e-invoicing |
The ETA has stated that e-receipt phases are unrelated to e-invoice phases and that e-receipts do not replace e-invoices. The most recent e-receipt decision we found on the ETA site when we reviewed it on 19 October 2026 is 361/2025, for sub-phase 1 of main phase 9, applying from 15 November 2025. Check your entity on the e-receipt inquiry page rather than relying on a quoted decision number.
Getting registered: five steps
1. Obtain an eSeal certificate
The ETA requires an electronic seal before self-registration. When it announced that requirement in 2022 it named three issuers: Egypt Trust, Misr for Central Clearing, and Fixed Egypt. The current list of e-signature service providers is published on the ETA's digital signature page, so check it before you buy. The certificate usually comes on a USB token; companies with high volumes often use an HSM instead.
2. Register the taxpayer profile and your systems
Your administrator registers the entity's digital profile on the ETA portal, invites other representatives, and registers each ERP or POS system that will call the ETA APIs. Each registered system receives API credentials (a client ID and secret). Treat them like passwords and keep them in a secrets vault, not in a shared file.
3. Code every item
- GS1: the global product code, usually the barcode on the pack.
- EGS: an Egypt-specific code the company creates on the ETA system for goods or services without a GS1 code. It must be approved before use.
An item without an approved code is always rejected.
4. Choose how you will issue documents
- Manual entry on the portal: workable for a handful of invoices a month, but every invoice is keyed twice.
- API integration: your ERP signs and submits each document when it is issued, and receives the result. This is what any entity invoicing daily needs, whether it runs ERPNext or another system.
5. Test, then go live
The ETA runs a pre-production environment with its own registration portal, invoicing portal, API and identity service. Run every document type you issue through it before the first live invoice. Pre-production uses internally issued certificates, so its root CA is trusted on test machines only, never in production.
How the integration works (for your IT lead)
- The ERP authenticates against the ETA identity service and receives an access token valid for 60 minutes by default. The ETA asks integrators to cache and reuse it for its full lifetime.
- The ERP builds the document, canonicalises it using the ETA's serialisation rules, and hashes it with SHA-256.
- The hash is signed with the eSeal certificate as a CAdES-BES signature.
- The ERP submits one document or a batch. The ETA answers HTTP 202: received, validation still running.
- The ERP learns the result through ETA callbacks (the approach the ETA recommends) or by polling the submission by its ID, with a wait that grows with the submission size.
The ETA compares each submission with the same taxpayer's submissions from the past 10 minutes and rejects an identical payload as a duplicate with HTTP 422. So never resend a batch after a 2xx response; wait for the validation result. The full API reference, environment URLs and Postman collection are on the official SDK site.
The most common rejection causes
The ETA validates documents in this published order: structure, core fields, signature, national ID, taxpayer, reference document, codes, then simple fields and calculations. Where we see failures:
- Structure: a missing field, or JSON/XML that does not match the document type version.
- Signature: expired certificate, token disconnected, or the document changed after signing.
- Buyer identity: an invalid tax registration number, or no national ID for a person buyer when the invoice exceeds the ETA's threshold. The ETA configures that threshold itself and the SDK does not publish the amount, so have your system ask for a national ID whenever the buyer is a person.
- Codes: an unapproved item code, or a unit or currency outside the ETA code tables.
- Calculations: tax, discount or totals that do not match the ETA formulas, often a rounding issue.
- Reference documents: a credit note with no valid original invoice, or worth more than it.
- Taxpayer status: a party not valid on the issue date.
Cancelling and rejecting documents
- The issuer can cancel a document within a limited period after submission. The ETA sets that period per document type; your system reads it from the Get Document Type API, and the SDK does not publish it as a fixed number.
- After the period, the API returns OperationPeriodOver and the fix is a credit note that references the original invoice.
- A document already referenced by a credit or debit note cannot be cancelled, and neither can a frozen document.
- A buyer who receives an invalid invoice can reject it through the system within a similar per-type window, and only once per document.
Deadlines and penalties
- On 28 September 2022 the ETA announced that the submission window was cut from 4 days to 3 days from the issue date as of 1 October 2022, then to 2 days from 1 November 2022, with a plan to remove the window and require same-day submission from 1 January 2023.
- On 13 January 2022 the ETA warned that late submission could lead to fines of EGP 20,000 to 100,000 under Article 71 of the Unified Tax Procedures Law No. 206 of 2020.
These are ETA statements on the dates given, and we found no later announcement on its site that changes them. Our working rule: submit on the day of issue, which an API integration does automatically. Confirm your entity's current position and any amended penalty amounts with your tax advisor.
Pre-go-live checklist
- eSeal valid, expiry date on a named person's calendar.
- ERP registered on the ETA profile, credentials stored in a secrets vault.
- Every item mapped to an approved GS1 or EGS code.
- Customer master holds tax registration numbers, and national IDs where required.
- Every document type tested on pre-production.
- A named person reviews rejected documents daily.
Need the integration built?
If your Egyptian entity invoices from an ERP, an API integration removes double entry and catches most rejections before they happen. We build and run that integration, from signing to status tracking; see ETA e-invoicing integration. For a figure for your case, send your system's name and monthly invoice volume through the technical estimate form and you get a written quote within one business day. Budgeting the ERP itself as well? See ERP system cost in Egypt.
