1st version of the Electronic Invoicing Guide

This guide was prepared by a working party set up and coordinated by The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) following the Council of Ministers Resolution of August 2005, where the Government stipulated that the Public Administration had to adopt eInvoicing by the end of 2006 and mandated UMIC with monitoring and evaluating execution of this measure.

In actual fact, the ambitious target set by the Government and the widely-recognised unfamiliarity across the board with the main aspects of eInvoicing soon made it apparent that a clear document needed to be prepared on the subject with straightforward answers to the most frequently asked questions.

The aforementioned working party included various members of public bodies (with the emphasis on the tax administration), non-governmental organisations (such as Aliança Digital (site in Portuguese) and the Association for eCommerce in Portugal (site in Portuguese) and companies. In terms of professional skills, the group involved jurists, economists, engineers and managers. We were privileged to be able to collaborate with a distinguished, well-humoured group of specialists who worked enthusiastically over a period of months with us. We thank them for their generosity and commitment.

The 1st version of the Electronic Invoicing Guide (text in Portuguese) was made available to the public for the first time on 3 March 2006 at the well-attended 2nd Digital Europaper Seminar (roughly 250 people in attendance), organised in partnership by UMIC and the FIL/AIP as part of Digital Europaper, a space dedicated to eCommerce at the FIL/AIP Europaper trade fair on 2 to 5 March 2006 at Parque das Nações.

The State’s adoption of eInvoicing is intended not only to improve services through increasing the thoroughness and effectiveness of the procedures adopted and to enable significant cost cutting in processing invoices, but also to act as a catalyst for widespread adoption by enterprises and to contribute to the spread of eCommerce in Portugal. We strongly believe that by making the main processing item in each transaction virtual, we will be setting out on a wide-reaching journey that will not only make significant processing cost cutting for invoices possible (usually gauged between 30% and 50%), but will also have repercussions on the entire related processing chain, with major gains for the economy and the competitiveness of the State and enterprises.

Luis Magalhães
President of UMIC

1st version of the Electronic Invoicing Guide (text in Portuguese) (1.24 MB).