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 reserve the TIN, the taxpayer completes the onboarding on the A-Cube onboarding page, 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

1. You reserve the taxpayer's TIN, from the dashboard or with POST /legal-entities. The legal entity appears with status Reserved, tied to your account.
2. In EmaraTax, the taxpayer selects A-Cube as its Accredited Service Provider.
3. EmaraTax hands the user over to A-Cube with a temporary authorization code.
4. On the A-Cube onboarding page, the taxpayer confirms its details. A-Cube activates the legal entity, registers it on the Peppol network and synchronizes it with the central registry.
5. When the onboarding completes, the legal entity is Active and can send and receive documents.

The reservation expires if the onboarding is not started in time. Reserving the same TIN again refreshes it.

In a production environment, steps 2 to 4 happen outside your application: you reserve the TIN, then read the resulting legal entity through the API.

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.