Recently, Portuguese Government has published an announcement postponing the mandatory ATCUD code for paper and electronic invoices to 1 January 2022. QR code regulation will remain applicable from 1 January 2021.
According to the previous legislation: Starting from 1 January 2022, on invoices and other fiscal documents, there must be a two-dimensional bar code (QR code) and a single document code (ATCUD), under the terms defined by order of the Government member responsible for the area of finances. The aim is to realize a more strict control of transactions carried out by taxable persons in order to combat the informal economy, fraud and tax evasion.
Taxpayers communicate the invoice series they will use to the Tax Authority and request ATCUD (or Validation-Sequential number code) for those invoices. ATCUD will contain:
- A) Series validation code and,
- B) The sequential number of the document within the series.
Moreover, in fiscal documents with more than one page, ATCUD must appear on all of them, immediately above the two-dimensional bar code (QR code).
Two-dimensional bar code (QR code)
The development of the two-dimensional bar code (QR code) must comply with the technical specifications defined by the Tax Authority, available on the Finance Portal.
QR code will contain almost all the contents of the invoice. In documents with more than one page, the QR code can appear on the first or last page.
The QR code implementation will come into force at the same time as the Portugal B2G electronic invoicing regulation. As of January 1, 2021, large taxpayers have to issue invoices to all public entities in electronic format. Small and medium companies have time until June 30, 2022. Then they also must switch to e-Invoicing for public transactions.
SNI has already developed an SAP solution for e-Invoicing. We have connected to the eSPap, the organization in charge of the e-Invoicing Portal FE-AP and finished implementation with some of our clients. You can use our software to send large amounts of e-Invoices to the government entities in an automated way.
