Since 1 September 2026, the company electronic vault has been mandatory for every entity registered with Tunisia's National Business Registry (Registre National des Entreprises, RNE). The service, announced on 27 May 2026 and offered until now as an optional activation, has left the voluntary phase. This is not a convenience feature bolted onto the portal: it is now the account through which a Tunisian company consults, files and retrieves its records at the registry.
Key points
- The electronic vault is a single, secure digital account, opened automatically for every registered company, firm or association, tied to the entity's unique identifier.
- It holds the data, documents and contracts filed with the RNE: articles of association, contracts, minutes of general meetings, updates.
- Access is free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with extraction of certified digital copies carrying an electronic timestamp.
- Activation requires a single in-person visit by the legal representative to the nearest RNE office.
- Since 1 July 2026, the RNE no longer accepts paper files: registration, filing and updates are exclusively online.
- Access to online services runs through digital identity: Mobile ID for natural persons, DigiGo for legal entities.
What actually changes
Taken on its own, a document vault looks like a convenience. Taken in sequence, it changes the nature of the relationship with the registry.
On 30 June 2026 the RNE received its last paper file. Since 1 July, registration, filing and updating run exclusively through the platform, and access to that platform presupposes a recognised digital identity. On 1 September, the vault became mandatory in turn. The practical consequence is simple: a company that has not activated its account no longer has any filing channel at all.
That is what separates this deadline from the usual digitalisation announcements. There is, at this stage, no published penalty text for failing to activate — and it would be dishonest to invent one. The constraint is not a fine, it is structural: the day you need to file the minutes of a general meeting, amend a statutory detail or produce a certified copy, the vault is the door. Without an activated account, the formality does not happen.
The registry's legal framework remains Law No. 2018-52 of 29 October 2018 on the National Business Registry, published in the Official Gazette (JORT) No. 89 of 6 November 2018, which created the National Business Registry Centre. The RNE has not published a decree specific to the vault: the measure was carried by a communiqué and a timetable, not by a text number. That is a useful distinction to hold before citing a legal basis nobody has produced.
How to activate it
The paradox of this fully digital reform fits in one line: it starts with a trip.
The legal representative must attend the nearest RNE office once, carrying their national identity card, to update the company's contact details — mobile number and email address. They then sign the general terms of use, collect their credentials, receive a verification code on the declared mobile, and change the initial password. The account is then open and everything else happens remotely.
The point to watch is the calendar, not the difficulty. The step is one-off and short, but it happens during counter hours. A company that discovers it on the day it has an urgent filing loses the day. The declared contact details matter too: the verification code goes to the registered number, and an out-of-date mobile in the file is enough to block activation.
Digital identity is the real prerequisite
The vault is the door; digital identity is the key, and that is where most companies stall.
Two mechanisms coexist. Mobile ID targets natural persons and is anchored to the national identity card number. DigiGo is the identity recognition tool for legal entities, issued within the TUNTRUST ecosystem, the Tunisian root certification authority under the ANCE. A company acting as a company — rather than through the person of its manager — falls under the second.
It is the very same certificate used elsewhere. We covered certificate types, approved resellers, real costs and lead times in digital certificates in Tunisia: types, providers and costs. A company that already holds a qualified certificate for signing its electronic invoices has nothing new to buy; one that postponed both files now faces two deadlines converging on the same dependency.
What this changes for your systems
For a micro-business, the vault is a consultation space and the matter ends there. For an organisation running document management, an ERP or a legal back office, the question is different.
Filed records now come back as certified digital copies, timestamped, tied to the entity's unique identifier. That means evidentiary documents with a fixed date, in a format that can be classified and reconciled automatically — provided the internal reference data uses the same identifier as the registry. Many Tunisian customer and supplier databases do not yet, and reconciliation is done by hand.
The convergence with electronic invoicing is the thing to watch. The same unique identifier, the same qualified certificate and the same timestamping logic structure the TTN circuit. On the obligations and penalties of the invoicing side, see electronic invoicing in Tunisia: law and penalties, and on how to verify where your chain actually stands, electronic invoicing compliance audit. The withholding tax side follows the same mandatory dematerialisation path, described in TEJ mandatory for all companies.
The next milestone
The RNE does not stop at the vault. Its director-general, Adel Chaouari, announced an electronic patente platform for September 2026, prepared by a joint working group bringing together the registry, the General Directorate of Taxes and the Finance Ministry's IT centre, to establish the necessary interconnections. Registry fees were also cut by 50 per cent from July 2026: incorporating a company went from 50 to 25 dinars, filing the minutes of a general meeting from 20 to 10 dinars. The registry counts some 850,000 registered entities.
The useful indicator for the end of the year is therefore not the vault itself, but what gets plugged into it: the day the patente is issued by the same platform, a company's digital identity stops being an administrative file and becomes an operational dependency.
At Noqta, we connect obligations like these to the systems already running: reconciling internal reference data on the unique identifier, ingesting timestamped records into a document management system or ERP, and a reporting layer on top. If this deadline lands on you with an existing stack to preserve, ask for a technical diagnostic before a tool gets picked.
Source: Registre National des Entreprises — the RNE goes full digital