Business Management System
Understand why a Business Management System is essential for companies of any size.
The Electronic Invoice
With the goal of a nationwide rollout of an electronic tax model to replace paper tax documents (forms 1 and 1a), the Electronic Invoice (NF-e) project was born.
These transactions standardize systems, and also reduce costs and simplify ancillary obligations for taxpayers. At the same time, they let tax authorities track operations in real time.
It's defined as: a document that only exists digitally, issued and stored electronically, meant to document, for tax purposes, a transaction involving the movement of goods or the provision of services between parties, whose legal validity is guaranteed by the issuer's digital signature (proof of authorship and integrity) and by the Treasury's receipt of the electronic document, before the goods are shipped or leave the premises.
Issuing the Electronic Invoice
To issue an NF-e, the business owner must request a digital certificate from a certifying authority (the list of providers is available on the website of the National Institute of Information Technology – ITI).
After that, you need to register with your state's Treasury Department so your business gets accredited. Then you choose a management and invoicing system — like TagPlus — to handle your finances.
If your business is in retail or manufacturing, you need to request invoices from the state Treasury Department. This can be done online, through a web request.
In some cases, in specific states, the administrator needs a username and password for the local Treasury system.
NF-e operating model
The issuance process follows these steps:
Generating an electronic file
The file generated in the previous step is already the NF-e, which gets transmitted over the internet to that taxpayer's State Treasury Department.
Generating protocols
At this stage, the formal integrity of the document is checked, and a receipt protocol called "Authorization of Use" is issued, meant to guarantee the transit of the goods.
Note: There are exceptions to the previous point, in cases provided for by law when there are technical issues in the taxpayer's communication with the tax authority.
Lookup
Only after the Authorization of Use is issued does SEFAZ make the document available for lookup online, for the recipient and other legitimate parties who hold the electronic document's access key.
Other destinations the invoice is sent to
- The Federal Revenue Service, which becomes the national repository of all issued NF-e;
- The destination State Treasury Department, in the case of an interstate transaction; and,
- Federal Public Administration bodies and entities with legal authority to regulate, standardize, control, and inspect, when necessary.
Who must issue it
Each of the taxpayer's establishments, in this case, is treated as its own entity under ICMS law. So each one must be registered in the ICMS taxpayer registry and issue the tax documents required by law.
As covered above, issuing it depends on the taxpayer first being accredited with their state's Treasury Department, and the process of generating and transmitting it can be done from anywhere, as long as the NF-e is issued by an issuing system and digitally signed with a certificate containing the CNPJ of any of the taxpayer's establishments — since this is a digital platform system.
Product limits for an NF-e
The Electronic Invoice allows up to 990 products per issuance; but we should also note the file-size limit that must be transmitted to SEFAZ to obtain authorization of use: XML files cannot exceed 500 Kbytes.
Unlike the DANFE, which can have as many pages as needed to list the products
Notes
- Each NF-e has only one corresponding DANFE, which can have one or more pages. Likewise, each DANFE corresponds to a single NF-e;
- The access key must appear on every page of the DANFE.
- If the DANFE is printed on more than one page, each page must be numbered, showing the current page and the total number of pages.
Possible NF-e statuses
Approved
This happens when all the data in the submitted file is successfully validated by the regional SEFAZ; besides checking the data, other checks are also performed, such as:
- Checking the taxpayers' legal standing;
- Checking the digital signature;
- Analyzing the structure of the data included, among others.
Denied
This happens after reviewing the status of the issuer and recipient of the invoice, in case either one has some kind of restriction with the tax authority, such as tax irregularities or outstanding debt.
Voided
In this case, the taxpayer declares that a given number will no longer be used. Example: the business owner approved NF-e number 40 and, by accident, also validated number 42, skipping number 41. In this case, the correct action is for the taxpayer to notify the tax authority that the last one will be voided, so the requirement to issue invoices in sequential numeric order isn't violated.
Canceled
This happens when the business issued the invoice, and the tax authority approved it, but the first party later decided not to keep that tax record.
Time for Sefaz to authorize an NF-e
The average time for an NF-e to be validated is, on average, up to one second. It's worth noting that this document is transmitted in batches, which lets the authorizing system release several Electronic Invoices in parallel.
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