The deadlines your company has for issuing and sending invoices to customers depends on the type of transaction and whether the recipient is a company or an individual.
Sending your business invoices will depend on who is issued to you. Based on this, the delivery times will vary.
If you issue an invoice to someone who is not a business or professional, you must do so at the time of the transaction. And dont forget to send it at the time of your shipment. However, if you issue an invoice to a business or professional, you must do so before the 16th day of the month following the month in which the tax due for the said transaction occurred.
Individual recipients
If the recipient of the transactions is an individual, invoices must be issued and sent on the accrual date of the transaction. For this purpose, transactions are usually considered to be accrued on the date the service is rendered or the goods are made available to the customer. However, there are exceptions; for example:
- In successive tract transactions (such as rentals or services continued over time), accrual occurs when each payment becomes due, and that is when the invoice must be issued.
- When an advance payment is made, the accrual also occurs and an invoice must be issued for the price charged.
In the case of recapitulative invoices, they must be issued, at the latest, on the last day of the calendar month in which the operations to which they relate were carried out. Please note that this type of invoice allows different operations carried out on different dates for the same recipient, provided that these transactions were carried out in the same calendar month.
Target Entrepreneurs
If the addressee is a trader or professional, the deadlines for normal invoices and recapitulative invoices are the same: they must be issued and sent to customers at the latest by the 16th day of the month following the due date.
In the case of intra-Community deliveries (i.e. sales of goods to traders established in other EU countries), invoices must be issued and sent by the 16th day of the month following that in which the transport of the goods to the acquiring entrepreneur began.
What are the penalties for not issuing invoices or sending them to customers outside the stipulated deadlines?
Failure to issue the invoices on time or late dispatch may lead to a proportional penalty of 1 per cent of the total amount of the invoices.
On the other hand, if the non-compliance consists of failure to issue invoices, the penalty amounts to 2% of the amount of the non-issued invoices. In these cases, if it is not possible for the tax authorities to know the amount of the transactions not invoiced, the penalty is 300 euros for each of them.
For more information, consult with Tax Advisor.
