The readiness checklist: six moves to make now

You don't need a transformation program to get ready for Fawtara. You need six things done in roughly this order, most of which cost attention rather than money. Businesses that finish this list before their phase is announced go live calmly. That's the whole secret.

1. Name one owner

E-invoicing sits awkwardly across tax, finance, and IT, which means without a named owner it belongs to nobody. Pick one decision-maker with authority across all three, and one escalation path. Committees discover problems; owners fix them.

2. Map your invoice data against PINT-OM

Take your five most common invoice types and compare their fields against what PINT-OM requires. You're looking for gaps (fields you don't capture) and shape problems (fields you capture in free text that the standard wants coded). This exercise takes days and de-risks months.

3. Clean your master data

Customer records, VAT numbers, addresses, units of measure. Every e-invoicing veteran will tell you the same thing: the format is the easy part; the master data is where projects bleed time. Duplicate customers with conflicting VAT numbers won't survive contact with validation.

4. Choose your provider early

Accredited-provider capacity tightens near each deadline — integration teams and onboarding slots are finite. Early movers also get more testing time on the provider's sandbox. Our seven questions for choosing an ASP is the shortlisting tool.

5. Reserve a realistic testing window

End-to-end user acceptance testing with simulated OTA submissions is where the surprises are supposed to surface — the odd credit-note scenario, the point-of-sale edge case, the export invoice with no VAT number. Give it weeks, not days. Testing compressed into a weekend is testing skipped.

6. Brief your people — and your suppliers

Your AP and AR teams will live in this system daily; they should not discover it at go-live. Neither should your key suppliers, whose invoices to you will also change. A one-page note and a short session cover it. Silence, on the other hand, generates a help-desk queue.