From 2024, companies and PFAs will have to use e-Invoice in business-to-business relations in accordance with the provisions New tax law (296/2023).Dan Manolescu, president of the Chamber of Fiscal Consultants, says that this invoicing system is somehow split into two stages.

1. “We have the first phase in the first half of next year, in which the e-Invoice system is the reporting system. That is, all invoices are issued as before, only there is an obligation to report on all issued invoices in the E-invoice system within 5 days,” he says.

In practice, says Manolescu, although we still have the 390 reporting system, this new system in some ways duplicates the electronic invoicing system in the first phase. It will probably be abandoned once it is found to be working.

“It doesn’t really make sense to have two types of reports on the same transactions,” he explained.

2. “Later, in the second half of the year, everything becomes much more rigid, in the sense that the reporting system becomes a system of issuing and receiving bills. All issued documents, all invoices will have to be issued through this system, and if they are not there and the supplier does not download them from this system, he will receive a fine in the amount of VAT,” he explained.

• “It’s like somehow they lose the right to deduct that VAT, which is obviously a very serious penalty.”

“Clarifications will certainly appear at the operational level. I am not sure that the tax authorities have the technical capabilities at the moment to manage such a huge volume of invoices starting from the middle of next year,” explains the president of the Chamber of Fiscal Consultants.

• “The reporting system, let’s say, starts in the first half of the year. A real-time sending and receiving system would certainly require very large hardware and software resources, which I don’t yet know if they have or can have ready by then.”

• “We are talking about six months of training. We know how the public procurement period lasts. The situation may be quite difficult, but this is a very bold calendar for now. Let’s see if it works”

See also: Humiliating the goose without shouting didn’t work for the Čolak government/ When opportunities for IT professionals will disappear and other things from the new tax law – VIDEO INTERVIEW with Dan Manolescu

Who is responsible for the data that will be uploaded to the SPV through the electronic invoicing system

“Until now, access to SPV data has been about certain statements, documents that were not related to the company’s operational activities,” explains Manolescu.

• “Perhaps in the case of outsourced accounting, those people who had an accounting service contract had access to the SPV and downloaded statements or downloaded certain data”

“Already when we talk about e-Invoice, for the most part, the task, let’s say administrative, lies with the taxpayer, because he is the one who runs the business, he makes sales, provides services, he knows what transactions he made, what invoices exhibit,” says Manolescu.

• “The accountant keeps them, but the accountant usually does not issue invoices”

“He records invoices in accounting. The commercial department, let’s say, is the one who issues the invoices, because he actually knows what was delivered, what was done,” explained the president of the Chamber of Fiscal Consultants.

• These documents are sent to the accounting department later, internally.

• “Who will upload this data to the SPV? Who will bill the SPV? These are details that everyone will determine according to each person’s specific situation.”

“There are companies that issue tens, hundreds, millions of invoices. There are companies that issue two or three invoices per month. It is clear that everything is different in each specific case,” explained Dan Manolescu.

• “With a large volume of invoices, you need automation and you need a process that takes data from a particular stream, say commercial, and generates invoices that are then first reported and then billed through that system, which creates a whole a number of computer programs and data exchange with servers”

“It’s definitely extra work, a lot of work. The term is quite short. Business entities are already having problems with how to do this. In PFA, it will certainly be an even more difficult problem,” the president of the Chamber of Fiscal Consultants also noted.