Najiz + Nafith: Automating Saudi Debt Enforcement

Almost every company operating in Saudi Arabia has the same painful line in its accounts receivable aging report: invoices past 120 days. The standard responses are to hand the file to a collection agency for a percentage, or to write it off as bad debt at year end.

Both responses miss the point. The Kingdom has built a fully automated enforcement rail, and your invoice is not eligible to ride it.

Saudi law does not recognise "an invoice" as an enforcement instrument. It recognises an executive instrument — a سند تنفيذي. The gap between the two is not purely legal. It is a difference in document format, which makes it a systems integration problem before it is a legal one.

An invoice is not an executive instrument

File an unpaid invoice with the courts and you are starting a lawsuit: a claim, hearings, proof of debt, a judgment — and only then do enforcement proceedings begin. That journey takes months, often longer.

Hold a valid promissory note (سند لأمر) and you skip the lawsuit entirely and go straight to the Enforcement Court (محكمة التنفيذ). No pleadings, no proving the debt exists. The instrument itself is the proof.

That single distinction separates a company that collects in a week from one that waits a year.

Two enforcement tracks, and only one is automatic

Here is the detail most finance teams miss. Enforcing a promissory note splits into two tracks:

The electronic track handles notes drafted manually — on paper, in a Word template, or through a platform not approved by the Ministry of Justice. You upload the note as an attachment through the Najiz portal, a human reviews the request, and a formal defect can get it bounced.

The automatic track handles notes created through the Nafith platform. These execute electronically end to end without direct human intervention, because the platform already verified the instrument's required elements and both parties' identities at creation time.

Put plainly: the paper form your customer signed in your office may be perfectly valid, but it enters through the slow door. The document format you choose at creation determines your collection speed a year later.

Nafith launched on 19 April 2020 under Ministry of Justice supervision. It creates the note electronically in line with the Commercial Papers Law, and both parties — creditor and debtor — authenticate their consent through Nafath, the unified national access gateway. That upfront consent is what forecloses the debtor's most common defence: "that is not my signature."

What actually happens in five days

Once an enforcement request is filed through Najiz, the system moves in two stages.

Article 34. The debtor is notified of the enforcement order and granted five days from the date of notification to pay or explain. This is a warning stage only — on its own it triggers no travel ban and no service suspension.

Article 46. If the window closes without compliance, coercive measures activate:

Article 47 adds the power to question the debtor, trace income sources, and appoint an expert to locate assets. Article 88 carries penalties up to imprisonment for deliberately concealing assets or obstructing enforcement.

The leverage is not the severity of any one measure. It is the compression of time. A debtor who ignores a monthly collections call behaves very differently against a five-day clock wired to their bank accounts and their commercial registration.

What it actually costs

Nafith's published fee schedule, per its own support portal (confirm current figures before you budget):

Compare that to a collection agency's percentage. Across a SAR 1,000,000 receivables portfolio the difference is not marginal — it is a fixed cost in the hundreds versus a commission in the tens of thousands. Note that prepaid bundles are valid for 12 months and unused credit expires, which is a planning constraint worth respecting.

Where the integration actually lives

On 30 June 2025 the Ministry of Justice launched the Najiz Developers portal at developers.najiz.sa for technical integration with external systems. It exposes more than 160 API products across four domains:

• Judiciary: 63+ APIs
• Notarisation: 49+ APIs
• Real Estate Exchange: 27+ APIs
• Enforcement: 21+ APIs

The portal provides a sandbox environment for testing against the APIs without touching production data, and integration enquiries go through takamul@moj.gov.sa.

That enforcement bucket is the decisive layer. Twenty-one endpoints in the enforcement domain means enforcement request status can flow into your finance system automatically, instead of a clerk opening the portal every morning to check. But exact endpoint names and specifications are released from the portal after your subscription is approved — do not build against guesswork. Ask for the Swagger documentation first.

Four failure modes that kill a request

The amount is not written in both words and figures. Stating the amount in words as well as numerals is a substantive requirement of a valid note. An automated document generator that prints only the numeral produces formally defective instruments at scale — and you will not discover it until enforcement.

The note was issued but never approved by the debtor. Nafith requires the debtor to authenticate consent. An unapproved note is not an instrument, and it still incurs an administrative fee. Treat this state as an operational alert, not a line in a monthly report.

The debtor's identity does not match their commercial registration. The note names an entity whose CR has since changed or transferred ownership, and enforcement needs a precisely identified party. Verify the CR and its status before issuing the note, not after default. That is exactly the verification job covered in our Maroof and Wathq business verification guide.

A vague maturity date. "On demand" and "within 30 days of delivery" are not automatable maturity dates. The system needs a specific date — and so does your finance system, to know when the clock starts.

What you actually build

The layer you need is not a new accounting system. It is a thin intermediary between your existing finance stack and the state platforms. Step one is an eligibility decision that turns the aging report into a list of issuance candidates.

type Receivable = {
  invoiceId: string;
  customerCr: string;      // customer commercial registration
  amountSar: number;
  dueDate: string;         // ISO
  hasSignedInstrument: boolean;
};
 
type Candidate = {
  invoiceId: string;
  daysOverdue: number;
  reason: string;
};
 
const DAY = 86_400_000;
 
export function selectForInstrument(
  rows: Receivable[],
  today = new Date(),
  minAmountSar = 5_000,
  minDaysOverdue = 45,
): Candidate[] {
  return rows
    .filter((r) => !r.hasSignedInstrument)
    .map((r) => ({
      invoiceId: r.invoiceId,
      amountSar: r.amountSar,
      daysOverdue: Math.floor(
        (today.getTime() - new Date(r.dueDate).getTime()) / DAY,
      ),
    }))
    .filter((r) => r.daysOverdue >= minDaysOverdue && r.amountSar >= minAmountSar)
    .map((r) => ({
      invoiceId: r.invoiceId,
      daysOverdue: r.daysOverdue,
      reason: `${r.daysOverdue} days overdue, SAR ${r.amountSar}`,
    }));
}

Then a formal validator that stops an invalid note from ever being issued. This function is what saves you the rejected-instrument fees:

type InstrumentDraft = {
  amountSar: number;
  amountInWords: string;
  beneficiaryName: string;
  debtorId: string;        // national ID or commercial registration
  maturityDate: string;    // ISO — no open-ended phrases
  cause: string;           // the underlying obligation
};
 
export function validateDraft(d: InstrumentDraft): string[] {
  const errors: string[] = [];
 
  if (!d.amountInWords?.trim()) {
    errors.push("Amount not written in words — substantive requirement");
  }
  if (!/^\d{10}$/.test(d.debtorId)) {
    errors.push("Debtor identifier must be 10 digits");
  }
  if (Number.isNaN(Date.parse(d.maturityDate))) {
    errors.push("Maturity date is not a resolvable date");
  }
  if (!d.cause?.trim()) {
    errors.push("Underlying obligation is missing");
  }
  if (!(d.amountSar > 0)) {
    errors.push("Invalid amount");
  }
 
  return errors;
}

Note that the validator runs before any billable call. Every note rejected after issuance costs you a fee and a cycle, and both are avoidable with a local check that costs nothing.

The bigger pattern

This intermediary is not a standalone project. It is the same shape that recurs with every Saudi government platform: a validation and reconciliation layer that you own, sitting between your systems and the state gateways. Build it once and it serves you in e-invoicing with ZATCA and Fatoorah, in government procurement through Etimad, and here in enforcement.

It is precisely the argument we set out in the ERP trap: integration, not replacement — the problem is rarely the accounting system itself, and almost always the missing layer that translates its data into exactly what the government entity requires.

One closing honesty note: the automatic rail accelerates the collection of an established debt. It will not rescue you from a genuinely insolvent customer, and it does not substitute for a credit check before the sale. What it does is convert collections from a negotiation into a procedure — and that alone changes how a stalling debtor behaves.

If your receivables routinely pass 90 days, the first question is not "which collection agency should we use?" It is "how many of our invoices are backed by an enforceable instrument at all?" The answer is usually zero.

Want to know how much of your receivables ledger could be converted into enforceable instruments? We review your aging report and finance-system architecture, identify the integration points required with Nafith and Najiz, and give you a clear effort estimate. Get in touch for a diagnostic session — no commitment.