Introduction
Legal entities represent the UAE taxpayer companies on whose behalf you activate and manage electronic invoicing and compliance procedures in A-Cube for the Emirates.
EmaraTax is the Federal Tax Authority platform where UAE taxpayers authenticate and where their verified company identity is held: TIN and, when available, VAT TRN. A legal entity in A-Cube is the counterpart of that record. It mirrors the identity verified in EmaraTax and adds what A-Cube needs to exchange documents on the company's behalf: contact details, onboarding status, and Peppol receiving capabilities.
This is why a legal entity cannot exist on its own. The company must already be registered in EmaraTax, and from there it must be onboarded into A-Cube through a dedicated procedure.
In practice, you never create a legal entity with a plain create request. You run the onboarding calls, and once onboarding completes, you read the resulting resource with GET /legal-entities and GET /legal-entities/{legalEntityId}.
Creating that link, refreshing it, and removing it are all onboarding operations, never manual edits. See Onboarding Legal Entity to know more.
The flow in a nutshell
- In EmaraTax, the taxpayer selects A-Cube as its Accredited Service Provider.
- EmaraTax hands the user over to A-Cube with a temporary authorization code.
- A-Cube verifies that handoff and returns a passport, which you pass to each of the following onboarding calls.
- When the last call reports the onboarding as completed, the legal entity exists in A-Cube and can send and receive documents.
In a production environment, steps 1 and 2 happen outside your application. The integration starts at step 3.
For the sandbox we simulate the behavior of steps 1 and 2. You can check how to do that with the Quick Start.
Receiving capabilities
Receiving capabilities define which Peppol document types the entity accepts.
To properly update the capabilities, you must call POST /legal-entities/{legalEntityId}/sync to publish the change to Peppol.