Guide
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How to Integrate Your POS with FBR
To integrate a POS with FBR you connect your invoicing software to FBR's computerised system through an FBR-licensed integrator. PRAL is itself a licensed integrator and provides the service free of cost on demand. No fee is payable to FBR, and FBR states that a physical visit to an FBR office is not required.
Not tax advice — This guide is general information, not tax or legal advice. Pakistan's e-invoicing rules have been amended and their deadlines extended repeatedly since 2025, so the position may have changed since this page was last verified. Confirm your own obligations with FBR directly or with a qualified tax advisor before acting.
Step 1 — Confirm you are registered and in scope
Integration presumes sales tax registration. Before anything technical, establish which regime applies to you and on what timeline. That is a question for FBR or your tax advisor, not for your software vendor, whose commercial interest points one way.
Step 2 — Choose a licensed integrator
Only a person licensed by FBR may provide an electronic invoicing system and connect you to FBR's network. The licence is granted by the Board and, under the rules introduced by SRO 69(I)/2025, is non-transferable.
FBR publishes the current list of licensed integrators on its website. Under STGO 01 of 2026 you may engage more than one, which removes the single-point-of-failure problem of depending on one provider.
PRAL, the FBR's own automation arm, acts as a licensed integrator and per FBR's FAQ provides integration services free of cost to registered persons on demand. If cost is the obstacle, start there.
Step 3 — Understand what it costs
- —FBR charges nothing. Its FAQ states no fee is to be paid to FBR by the registered person or the licensed integrator.
- —PRAL provides integration free of cost on demand.
- —Commercial licensed integrators may charge for configuration and integration, but not above thresholds specified by FBR in sales tax general orders.
- —Your own software cost is separate: modifying an existing system, or building one that can talk to the integrator's API.
Step 4 — Build or adapt the software side
This is the part that is actually engineering. Your system needs to construct each invoice in the required format, transmit it at the point of sale, handle the response, store the returned identifier against the transaction, and print it on the customer's receipt.
It also needs to behave sensibly when the connection fails, which in Pakistan it will. A design that blocks the sale when FBR's endpoint is unreachable will stop your counter during an outage. A design that queues, retries and reconciles will not. Decide that behaviour deliberately rather than discovering it on a Friday evening.
FBR publishes technical documentation and a user manual for the digital invoicing system, linked in the sources below.
Step 5 — Test before you go live
Validate against the integrator's test environment with real-shaped data: your actual product lines, your actual tax rates, your actual return and exchange cases. Credit notes, discounts and partial refunds are where invoice formats usually break, and they are exactly what nobody tests.
Confirm what happens to an invoice that needs correcting. Under STGO 01 of 2026 a valid electronic invoice can be cancelled, deleted or edited inside FBR's system within 72 hours of issuance; after that it takes prior approval from the Commissioner Inland Revenue. Your staff need to know that window exists before they need it.
Step 6 — Train the counter
Compliance fails at the counter far more often than in the code. Staff need to know that every sale goes through the system, what to do when the connection drops, how to handle a return, and why the identifier on the receipt matters.
A system that is technically integrated but routinely bypassed for cash sales is not compliant. It is just a more expensive way of being non-compliant.
Sources
Every factual claim on this page traces to one of the following. Where FBR publishes something directly, that is what we have used.
FAQ
Questions, answered.
No. FBR's published FAQ states that physical visits to FBR are not required for digital invoicing integration. The process runs through your licensed integrator and FBR's online systems.
According to FBR's own FAQ, PRAL acts as a licensed integrator and shall provide free of cost integration services to registered persons on demand. That covers the integration service itself; any changes needed to your own software are a separate cost.
It depends almost entirely on your software rather than on FBR. If your system is already built to be extended, adding integration is typically a matter of a few weeks including testing. If you are on closed subscription software, the timeline is whatever your vendor decides it is.
That depends on how your system was designed, which is why it is worth deciding deliberately. A well-built system queues invoices locally, keeps the counter operating and reconciles with FBR when connectivity returns, rather than refusing the sale. Confirm the exact treatment required for your regime with your integrator.