Receiving Bills by Email: How to treat them?

May 14, 2014 | Electronic invoicing

At easyap we are observing how, month after month, the reception of invoices by email is growing unstoppably, being in the vast majority of cases pdf documents. This situation is caused by the regulatory change that came into force on January 1, 2013 (Royal Decree 1619/2012), which regulates invoicing obligations and which, in order to promote the use of electronic invoices, assimilates paper invoices to electronic invoices. electronic invoicing assimilates paper invoices to electronic invoices, for which, among other things, the pdf is given validity as a support for the invoice, provided that certain requirements are met.

According to the rule, the storage and access obligations for electronic invoices are the same as for paper invoices.

Receiving invoices by email : How do you deal with them?

In summary, the rule indicates that the obligation of conservation must be complied with by any means that allows guaranteeing the authenticity, the integrity of the content, its legibility as well as access without delay to the Tax Administration.

In view of these obligations, the question is the following: is e-mail a suitable tool for the storage of incoming invoices?

The answer is quite simple: No.

E-mail may be the appropriate means for receiving the invoice in pdf, but it is not for consultation or archiving. How can you respond to a request from the Tax Office to search for a particular invoice in a postal database? Usually, the document received does not contain any reference to the invoice number, date, amount, issuer and recipient in its identification... The search for a specific invoice when the volume is low can be a difficult task, but it will end up giving results. But what happens when there is a significant volume of invoices per year, and when the request received is transferred to documents that are, say, three years old?

Requirements for the receipt of invoices

In order to comply with the requirements, it will be necessary to have document management tools that archive the image of the invoice together with certain data so that, when the time comes, it can be searched. And as complementary tools that accelerate the invoice processing cycle and necessary for these obligations: OCR (to help in data extraction, which will later be the data to be consulted) and workflows for the cycle and automatic posting ( and which will allow online access and consultation)

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