SUMMARYModelling of plastic anisotropy requires the definition of stress potentials (coinciding with the yield criteria in case of the associated flow rules) or, alternatively, plastic strain-rate potentials. The latter approach has several advantages whenever material parameters are determined by means of texture measurements and crystal plasticity simulations. This paper deals with a phenomenological description of anisotropy in elastoplastic rate-insensitive models by using strain-rate potentials. A fully implicit time integration algorithm is developed in this framework and implemented in a static-implicit finite element code. Algorithmic details are discussed, including the derivation of the consistent (algorithmic) tangent modulus and the numerical treatment of the yield condition. Typical sheet forming applications are simulated with the proposed implementation, using the recent non-quadratic strain-rate potential Srp2004-18p. Numerical simulations are carried out for materials that exhibit strong plastic anisotropy. The numerical results confirm that the presented algorithm exhibits the same generality, robustness, accuracy, and time efficiency as state-of-the-art yield criterion-based algorithms.