B2B and B2G eInvoicing in Italy as from 01.01.2019

After 1 January 2019, all domestic invoices issued by permanently established organizations in Italy must be compliant with the new eInvoicing framework. This means that regardless of what invoice practices you have in place today, be they paper, EDI, e-mail or scanned, you must have migrated to the Italian FatturaPA XML format and have a solution in place that means you are connected to the government’s IT-platform known as the Sistema di Interscambio, or SDI for short. After this time any invoice issued in any other way than through the government IT platform will not be compliant and will for fiscal purposes be considered as simply never having been created. Non-compliance will lead to a disruption or complete shutdown of your global supply or demand chain and leave buyers unable to reclaim the VAT that they are due, as well as risk reputational harm and penalties. Italy took this strong step of introducing its ambitious eInvoice mandate in a bid to tackle its multi-billion VAT gap, the largest among the EU Member States. Through the introduction of mandatory eInvoicing and with its SDI platform, Italy is successfully disrupting decades of established business practices in the process by reversing the ‘self-assessment’ nature of VAT collection. Once the mandate comes into force, the Italian tax administration will have full access to your company’s invoice data, allowing it to monitor your end-to-end business transactions, as they happen. What this means is that the Italian tax administration can in real-time audit invoice data to ensure that the tax you pay and report is accurate in an entirely new and unprecedented manner. Exact is preparing the functionality for their Italian Exact Globe customers to migrate into the new invoicing standard. In reality appliance of the new standard in Italy generally leads into consideration of three key important components:

• Every issued domestic invoice must be represented with the FatturaPA XML format.
• Invoices eInvoices cannot be sent directly to debtors but must be uploaded into the SDI platform. This stage technically considering various methods of upload, like manual or via authorized mail address or automatically with machine-to machine solution via web-services
• Invoices can be received by debtors and approved by them only in the electronic form and only from the SDI platform

The crucial step converting Italian Exact Globe customers into the new standard of exchanging domestic invoices is to enable them with the functionality of generating the required XML form of FatturaPA when processing logistic invoice entries. The standard invoicing functionality in Exact Globe is extraordinary feature-rich. Customers may have used large scale of flexibility of this solution to print and/or send invoices by mail in PDF or HTML format with almost fully customized content of the invoice layout. Moreover; Exact Globe customers were able to adjust some data relative to VAT even after the invoice is issued. The electronic XML schema does not allow much of flexibility of reflecting data in the invoice. The new standard of submitting invoices into SDI platform is totally excluding the ability of adjusting data for issued invoice as soon as its being submitted into the platform. This information becomes the only truth for Tax Authorities relative to all invoice details, including VAT information. At this very stage Exact focuses on implementing the functionality of generating eInvoices for Italian customers. The delivery of this functionality is planned for the respective service pack of product update 416 of Exact Globe in the first week of December 2018. Further stages of the implementation of the eInvoicing solution for Italian Globe customers shall be considered during 2019.