Electronic invoicing in Morocco: what changes for your business

An electronic invoice is an invoice that is born, travels and is kept as data, without ever going through paper. Three elements define it, and they go together:

• A structured format — the invoice is an XML file in which every piece of information sits in a named field: seller's ICE, buyer's ICE, date, description, quantity, price before tax, VAT rate and amount, total, means of payment. Two international standards have been retained, UBL 2.1 and CII.
• An electronic signature — applied with a certificate issued by a trust service provider, it guarantees the identity of the issuer and the integrity of the content. It is the digital equivalent of the company stamp and the signature, governed by Law No. 43-20 on trust services for electronic transactions.
• A controlled transmission — the invoice does not travel straight from supplier to customer: it goes through the tax authority platform, which checks its compliance and validates it.

How it differs from an ordinary invoice

The vocabulary varies — e-invoice, dematerialised invoice, electronic invoicing — but it all means the same thing. Beware of one false friend, though: dematerialisation in the broad sense (sending a PDF rather than paper) is not electronic invoicing in the tax sense.

The reform did not come out of nowhere: it rests on a text voted several years ago, and on a decree that is not there yet.

The principle: article 145-IX of the General Tax Code

The 2018 Finance Act added to article 145 of the General Tax Code a paragraph IX requiring taxpayers subject to corporate income tax, to income tax on professional income (net real or simplified net regime) and to VAT to “equip themselves with a computerised invoicing system meeting the technical criteria set by the administration”. The same text refers the practical rules to secondary legislation. That single sentence is the foundation of the whole reform.

What an invoice must already carry

The mandatory particulars, on the other hand, have applied for a long time. Article 145-III requires pre-numbered invoices bearing the seller's identity, their tax identification number, the date of the transaction, the buyer's name and address, the nature, quantity and price of the goods or services, the amount of VAT charged on top of the price, as well as the payment references and method. Article 145-VIII adds the ICE — the common business identifier — mandatory on invoices since 2016.

What the 2026 Finance Act changed

The 2026 Finance Act (No. 50-25), enacted by dahir No. 1-25-67 of 10 December 2025, published in the Official Bulletin of 16 December 2025 and in force since 1 January 2026, took the march towards full digitisation one step further without dealing directly with invoicing:

• accounts must be kept in electronic form in accordance with the legislation in force — the reference to a regulatory text that had never been published disappears from article 145-I;
• the taxpayer gives the tax authority an e-mail address of their own choosing: the obligation to go through a certification provider is dropped.

The tax authority's circular note No. 737, published in February 2026, comments on these measures one by one. It sets out no electronic invoicing timeline, however.

Eventually, every business that invoices. For now, the running order has been announced, not decreed.

The scope written into the law

Article 145-IX covers taxpayers subject to corporate income tax, taxpayers subject to income tax on professional income under the net real or simplified net regime, and taxable persons for VAT. In other words: companies, and individuals carrying on a professional activity under a real regime. Flat-rate regimes and the self-employed entrepreneur status are not covered by that text at this stage.

The announced running order

If you sell to businesses, you are therefore concerned on both sides: as the issuer of your own invoices, and as the recipient of your suppliers' invoices — which is often how reality arrives first, when a large buyer asks its suppliers to switch along with it.

What has actually happened

1. 2018 Finance Act — the principle of the computerised invoicing system enters the General Tax Code (article 145-IX), with the practical rules left to secondary legislation.
2. 2024 — after an international call for tenders, the tax authority awards the national platform contract to the Moroccan company xHub, for 6.3 million dirhams. A public consultation is launched in the autumn.
3. 2025 — pilot phase: volunteer companies test the platform in real conditions, issue test invoices and send back their observations.
4. 16 April 2026 — the head of the tax authority, Younès Idrissi Kaitouni, publicly confirms a launch during 2026: the platform has been built, tested and accepted, the roll-out will be gradual and segmented, it will start with B2B and with large companies. The draft decree is then with the General Secretariat of the Government.
5. 6 September 2026 — the implementing decree has still not been published in the Official Bulletin. Until it is, no starting date and no threshold can be enforced.

What the decree will have to say

• the timeline, category of business by category of business;
• the thresholds that decide the running order;
• the technical rules: accepted formats, connection method, mandatory data, filing deadline;
• the fate of the penalties specific to the scheme, which do not exist yet.

The right posture is therefore neither panic nor wait-and-see: the useful preparation steps described below depend on no decree.

Morocco has chosen the clearance model — prior validation by the administration —, one of the most demanding there is. In practice, an invoice follows this circuit:

1. Issue — your management software produces the invoice in the structured format (UBL 2.1 or CII) instead of printing it.
2. Signature — the file is electronically signed with your certificate, which seals its content and proves who issued it.
3. Transmission — the invoice is filed on the tax authority platform, from your software or from the online entry portal.
4. Validation — the platform checks the format, the signature and the mandatory data, then validates the invoice and gives it an identifier.
5. Reception — the validated invoice is made available to your customer, together with confirmation that it has been accepted.
6. Archiving — each party keeps the validated file, in a tamper-proof form, for the legal retention period.

If the platform rejects the invoice — a wrong ICE, a missing particular, an invalid signature — then it is not issued. You correct it and file it again. That is the deepest change of all: the check moves from after to before.

Two ways to connect

A role for certified trusted third parties, carrying the flows on behalf of businesses, is mentioned for later; at the start, the tax authority handles validation itself.

Two frequent mix-ups

• fatourati.gov.ma is not fatourati.ma. The latter is a service for paying water, electricity or telecom bills: nothing to do with tax invoicing.
• This is not the French reform. France went through approved private platforms and through Chorus Pro for the public sector; Morocco has chosen a public platform that validates each invoice itself. A scheme designed for France does not make you compliant in Morocco.

Data quality stops being a detail

Today, an invoice carrying a wrong ICE goes out anyway: the problem surfaces months later, at best with the accountant, at worst during a tax audit. Tomorrow, it is rejected within the second. Your customer file — exact corporate name, ICE, address, tax identification number — becomes a working part of the invoicing machinery, not a simple address book.

Numbering and particulars become blocking

An unbroken numbering sequence, the particulars of article 145, consistent VAT rates and amounts: what used to be good housekeeping becomes a condition of issue.

Archiving becomes digital, and long

Article 211 of the General Tax Code requires accounting records to be kept for ten years. So you have to plan where the validated invoices will live, in a form that preserves their integrity and lets you produce them during an audit. A folder on a desktop computer is not an archive.

The administration sees the flows in real time

That is the very point of the reform: fighting fake invoices and under-declaration, and making VAT reliable. An expert quoted by the business press puts the damage from fake invoices at several tens of billions of dirhams. In time, this material makes it possible to pre-fill returns and to target audits instead of widening them.

Payment terms become indisputable

Law No. 69-21 on payment terms already requires businesses above 2 million dirhams of turnover to file a quarterly return with the tax authority, electronically, on pain of fines ranging from 5,000 to 250,000 dirhams. With an invoice date time-stamped by the platform, the starting point of the term is no longer open to argument — in either direction.

What you gain from it

• no more re-keying: the invoice you receive feeds your accounts directly;
• invoice-to-order-to-delivery matching that can be automated;
• faster chasing, because the date of receipt is established;
• the end of “I never received the invoice” disputes.

Let us be clear: no penalty specific to electronic invoicing has been published so far. Article 145-IX refers the practical rules to secondary legislation, and the awaited decree — or a later finance act — will say what they are.

In the meantime, the general penalties of the General Tax Code do already apply:

The third line is the heaviest, and it is not measured in fines: it is measured in extra tax, on the side of whoever received the invoice.

1. Clean up your customer file — exact corporate name, address, tax identification number and above all the 15-digit ICE. That is the field that will get your invoices rejected, and it is the longest to put straight.
2. Check your particulars — take one invoice at random and hold it against article 145-III: identity, tax identification number, ICE, date, description, quantities, prices, VAT, means of payment.
3. Audit your numbering — one continuous chronological sequence, with no gap and no duplicate, across the whole year.
4. Question your software vendor — the only question that matters: “by what date will your product output UBL 2.1 or CII and connect to the tax authority platform?” A vague answer is an answer.
5. Plan for the electronic signature — identify who, in the company, will hold the certificate, and from which trust service provider.
6. Organise archiving — ten years of digital invoices, backed up, findable and unalterable.
7. Train whoever does the invoicing — the hard part of this reform is organisational before it is technical: the daily gesture changes, not just the software.

Businesses that already deal with the public sector through the AJAL platform have a head start on that road: they have learned to move an invoice around without paper.

We sell mostly to businesses, public bodies and associations: “how will I receive my invoice?” is a fair question, and here is our answer.

iris.ma will offer its customers electronic invoicing, in the standards set by the reform, as soon as it takes effect. Your invoices will be issued in the required structured format, signed, filed on the tax authority platform and made available to you once validated — with nothing for you to do and no change in the way you order. We are following the tax authority's work and the publication of the decree so as to be ready on the day the obligation reaches our category of business.

What already exists today

• a compliant invoice bearing the ICE for every business order;
• a quotation drawn up in your name, to be approved by your management or your accountant;
• your order documents available in your account, at any time;
• the services a purchasing department expects — our business area sets them out.

The useful step, on your side

Fill in your company's exact corporate name and ICE in your account now. Those two pieces of information are the ones the platform will check when validating your invoices: an ICE that is right today is an invoice that will go through tomorrow. Our own ICE and registrations appear in our legal notice.

For a business order, a quotation request or a question about your documents, use our quotation form: you get an answer from a person, not an automatic acknowledgement.