Odoo integrates e-invoicing with AI to streamline client accounting in UAE

Hello and welcome to this presentation, this webinar. Um, today what we're going to see is how you can manage your accounting for your clients in ODU. So, driving um, driving accounting excellence powered by AI. First, let me introduce myself. I'm Benjamin Murdis. I'm a project manager here at ODU and I'm an accounting expert for the accounting firms. So before we start, small word from our CEO and founders Fabian. Our mission is to help grow. We want to uh to help company growth. We want to unleash companies potential by empowering users with a tool they love. What does that mean? It means that we try to give a tool as friendly user as possible to our clients so that they can grow their business within ODU. So for today's agenda, we have a special guest here that we going to I'm going to introduce to you a bit later that comes from clear tax. It's uh Shim and he's going to talk about the integration that we're going to have natively inside ODO for the invoicing that's coming up in the UAE. Then we're going to have a small presentation about ODOU and also an accounting demo where you will be able to see how you can actually manage your accounting in ODO and manage the documents from your clients. If you have any question, please feel free to add them in the pad and we'll have a Q&A session at the end. So Shim, can you maybe please join us so you can present yourself and explain how we're going to integrate ODU with clear tax. Thank you Benjamin. Uh hello viewers, good morning. Uh pleasure to be here at the ODO station. Um I am Shamim. I am an associate director at Clear Tax. Um yep. So um e- invoicing is one of the hot topics today in UAE and uh a lot of you would be researching and getting familiarized with e- invoicing requirement through the materials available online. So today we'll be talking more about uh e- invoicing and how uh odo users get to access and use e- invoicing in a seamless uh manner. Uh before we get deeper into the topic let me talk a bit about clear tax. Um we are an e- invoicing expert. Uh we provide e- invoicing across geographies. We provide a global e- invoicing platform which supports uh more than 50 countries with e- invoicing and we already serve 5,000 plus global enterprises. We process more than a billion e invoices uh um annually through our platform already and we are a team of about thousand plus employees across uh various geographies. We have a local team uh in UAE and uh some of the customers that we serve uh we have customers across uh the spectrum industrywide um ERPwide and uh when it comes to accreditation and approvals from the respective uh authorities. Um this is something that we take very seriously. We are approved and accredited in all the geographies that we are present in in the UAE. Um back in September uh 2025 uh was when the FDA first rolled out a list of pre-approved solution providers. There were only five solution providers at that time and uh we were one of them and uh by now we have completed the accredititation process. So we are fully approved and accredited uh in the UAE and not just in the UAE. We are approved in Saudi, we are approved in Germany, we are approved in uh France, in Oman, in Belgium, in India, in Malaysia, in all the geographies we are present in, we are approved and accredited. So today uh what we are going to cover is u about e-invoicing mandate in the UAE. I'm sure many of you would be keen uh to understand more about the e- invoicing mandate and then we'll also touch upon what it really means uh for you and we'll talk about the ODO and clear tax partnership. We recently announced this partnership to make the lives of ODO users uh simpler and uh what changes for finance teams and from compliance to opportunity. How do we uh convert this compliance requirement to competitive advantage? Right? So that's what we're going to cover over the next uh 10 to 12 uh minutes. Firstly about the UAE invoicing mandate. Right? Invoicing may be new for the UAE but it's been there uh for quite some time across multiple countries and geographies and UAE has adopted a pepal based model for e invoicing that's a European model already live in multiple countries Belgium was a recent example where they went live with a four corner model and then soon to move to a five corner model but UAE from day one has adopted a five corner model I'll talk about the model in the next slide but uh talking about the timelines If you see on the screen uh there are three phases of rollout. The first phase is for all companies above an annual turnover of 50 million uh dirhams. Right. For the first phase, the deadline to appoint an ASP is 30th October 2026 and then the mandate uh goes live from 1st of January 2027. And the next segment is all companies less than 50 million dirhams in annual turnover. So it's not just applicable for VAT registered businesses. It applies for all businesses in the UAE uh in phase 2. And the deadline to appoint an ASP is 31st of March 2027 and the deadline to go live is 1st of July 2027. And then the third phase is only for government entities and uh there's a different timeline for the government entities to go live. Right? So uh if you notice here appointing an ASP is a mandatory step in complying with the e- invoicing requirement and and clear tax is one of the approved ASPs by the ministry of finance uh in UAE. Um this is one of the most important uh slides that we all should be familiar with by now. Uh this is the five corner model. I'll just briefly walk you through the model in case some of you are uh seeing this for the first time. So uh as you can see there are five different corners here. Corner one, corner two, corner three, corner four and corner five. So from a sales invoice perspective, you are corner one when you generate your sales invoice right uh from ODO system um the ODO system or you are the corner one and there is a corner two which is the ASP that is uh uh appointed by you by the seller right so assuming clear tax in this case. So uh the moment you generate an invoice from uh ODU right uh automatically in the back end uh the invoice gets transferred to clear tax that is a corner two for processing and when I say processing there are multiple steps involved here first is a data validation then there's a data enrichment then there is a data transformation and then there's a data transport right so it's not just generating and sending an invoice to the government it is also exchanging the invoice with the buyer so we manage manage all of this as an ASP right at corner 2 and then from corner two um once we do all these steps we transmit the invoice to the corner 3 and to the corner five. So there are a lot of transformations required in between uh the data formats acceptable by the corner five and corner 3 would be different and we manage all of that at corner two level. So we transmit the invoice to corner three and corner five and corner three delivers the invoice to the corner four. So corner three is the ASP partner of your buyer. So every company in the UAE is required to choose an ASP partner, right? So corner 2 to three and 3 to four, the invoice gets delivered. The invoice that you just generated in ODU gets delivered to the buyer instantly in real time and similarly it is reported to the FTA which is corner 5 instantly in real time. So that's that's about how a sales invoice travels uh in the system and at the same time you can see there's an arrow from corner 3 to five as well. So uh to the FTA the same invoice gets reported twice one from the seller side and one from the buyer side. The buyer's ASP the corner three also sends a copy uh to the corner five right so that's how a sales invoice travels through the e- invoicing uh network. Similarly, if you look at purchase invoices, so here both sales and purchases are part of e- invoicing. So, um when you look at your purchase invoices, what happens is uh whenever your supplier raises an invoice against you, right? They send it to their ASP and their ASP will send it to us. If if if you have integrated with clear tax, we receive all your incoming invoices or the AP invoices at our platform and we deliver it uh to your ODO system, right? That's how you get to see all your incoming invoices directly uh at your ODO system, right? So, this is how e invoicing uh system works. And again, it's a compliance requirement. There are penalty implications uh for non-compliances. Um you can see there is a penalty of 5,000 dirhams per month. If you do not um comply on time. So if you don't appoint an ASP before the deadline, this is the penalty. And if you don't go live as per the deadline, there is a penalty of 100 dirhams per invoice and subject to a capping of maximum 5,000 per month. So uh compliance um has a penalty implication if you don't uh follow the timelines and uh prepare yourself. So now how do we help you comply on time and uh simplify things for you. So u that's where we have a strong partnership uh um with ODU and um before we just just get into the partnership right it's also important uh to understand uh what is different like all of you have been generating invoices from your ERP system your odo system in a in an electronic format then how is electronic invoice different from what you're currently doing right so uh it's not just a uh new format of invoice uh it's more structured data the country has standardized uh the data required in every invoice in the country. So there's a format given there's a pepal international ae version of a data dictionary given there are rules given for each field and there is a uh XML format uh which has to be shared across the network and uh that's what um we are standardizing and we are helping you um uh ensure that the invoices that you're generating are in the right format in the right uh with the right uh uh technical specifications and in the right format etc. So it's a it's a more structured data not just in your system but at th