Bilingual invoice in Arabic and English

Clients in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait routinely expect an invoice their Arabic-speaking finance team and their English-speaking procurement team can both read. A bilingual invoice is not a translated invoice. It is one document carrying both languages at once, with the numbers shared.

What gets doubled and what does not

Labels are doubled: the document name, the column headers, the totals rows, the party headings, the amount in words. Values are not. Your client's name is their name in whichever script they wrote it. An amount is an amount. Doubling values produces a cluttered document and invites the two copies to disagree.

• Document name, for example Tax invoice and فاتورة ضريبية
• Column headers: description, quantity, rate, amount
• Subtotal, tax and total due
• From and billed to
• The amount in words, written separately in each language rather than translated

Right to left is a layout, not a mirror

An Arabic invoice is not an English one flipped. The text runs right to left, so the document name sits at the right, the totals block sits at the left, and the table columns run in the other order. Numbers stay left to right inside that: an account number or a tax registration number reads the same way in both languages, and reversing it would make it wrong.

The percent sign is a small trap. In an Arabic line the ASCII per cent character drifts to the wrong end, so 15% reads as %15. Arabic has its own per cent sign and it stays where it belongs. Invoicora uses it automatically on Arabic pages.

Digits

Gulf invoices normally use Western digits, the ones you are reading now, even in Arabic text. Arabic-Indic digits are available and some clients prefer them, so it is a setting rather than an assumption. One thing never changes: if the invoice carries a ZATCA QR code, the code's contents always use Western digits and plain decimals regardless of what the page shows, because that is what the specification requires.

A worked example

Fonts matter more than you expect

Arabic set in a Latin font either fails to join the letters or falls back to whatever the reader's device has. Both look careless on a tax document. Invoicora sets Arabic in Noto Naskh Arabic everywhere, on screen and inside the PDF, and embeds it in the file so the invoice looks the same on a machine that has never seen an Arabic font.

The text in the PDF stays real text, not an image. Your client can copy the tax number out of it and search for the invoice number in their own system, which is the difference between a document and a picture of one.

Turn on bilingual mode in the Finish step, choose the second language, and every label doubles. Choose the Bilingual split or Gulf tax invoice template to give the second language its own place on the page.