Isn't the point of the invoice that you send it to your client and they then pay you within a certain period of time (e.g. within 15 days)? Or does AFIP expect us to get our clients to pay us using an unofficial invoice, then submit the official factura when the payment arrives? I mean, that's fine by me, but shouldn't the whole point be that you submit the official factura to your clients and then wait to get paid?
Well as I understand it, at least in relation to the factura “E” for export, the ‘factura electrónica’ isn’t the actual invoice document at all. Before ‘facturación electrónica’ came in around 2014, in order to get invoice payments liquidated into my account, I had to go to the bank with my invoice (created myself in a Word document), the bank’s ‘solicitud de liquidacion’ form, and a quaint old thing called a ‘talón de factura E’, in which I filled out the details of the invoice by hand.
In those days, you had to go to an AFIP-authorised printer get a book of ‘talones factura E’ made. It had pink coloured duplicate pages, and you had to use carbon paper to make the duplicate copy. Apparently at that time, no distinction was made between goods and services, so the original ‘talón’ would be one of the documents you had to take to the port or airport when you exported your goods. In my case, I just photocopied it and presented it to the bank, I suppose to show that the income was declared.
Then came the requirement to create a ‘factura electrónica’ on the AFIP system. But that didn’t mean I stopped using my self-generated invoice, which I send to my client every month, and on the basis of which they pay me. A problem I had when the ‘factura electronica’ system started was that when my client’s accounts department queried some of the calculations in my invoice, with small adjustments to the totals, I would have to enter the AFIP system, cancel the ‘factura electronica’, and generate a new one. After a while I realised that the easiest thing is to wait until the payment arrives, and only then create the ‘factura electronica’.
Thus every month, when my payment arrived, I went to the bank with 3 documents: bank’s ‘solicitud de liquidacion’ form, my self-generated invoice (on the basis of which my client pays me) and the ‘factura electronica’. This is the documentation I’m once again presenting to the bank, without problems.
So as far as I understand it, the ‘factura electrónica’ is not for all intents and purposes the real invoice. Imagine if you were exporting to China or somewhere: you’d need to send the invoice in a language they’d understand. In my case, I’m exporting to France, so my ‘real’ invoice is naturally in French, following a format that their accounts department recommended to me.
