Electronic invoice in the Philippines: Electronic Invoicing System – EIS
The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) has resumed the electronic invoicing project, initially targeting the country’s top 100 taxpayers.
We recommend companies to start preparing their systems and transitioning to the electronic model in advance to avoid any penalties from the BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue).
The Philippines is moving forward with the implementation of its new Electronic Invoicing System (EIS). The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) is leading the effort to roll out electronic invoicing nationwide.
The EIS is a digital platform designed to receive, process, and store sales data transmitted by taxpayers through their electronic invoices or receipts issued via CAS, POS, or invoicing software.
In accordance with the Tax Code of 1997, the following taxpayers are required to issue electronic sales invoices or receipts instead of manual documents and to electronically report their sales data to the BIR:
- Taxpayers engaged in the export of goods and/or services;
- Taxpayers involved in e-commerce; and
- Taxpayers under the jurisdiction of the Large Taxpayers Service (LTS).
In 2022, the BIR selected 100 of the country’s largest taxpayers to launch the pilot phase of the EIS. However, in November 2023, the BIR announced technical challenges in maintaining the system, which caused delays in this initial phase. Despite these issues, the BIR has resumed the pilot phase with the 100 large taxpayers, as the platform is now operating normally.
How does the new electronic invoicing system work in the Phillipines?
The EIS in the Philippines is made up of an invoice report sent to the government’s central platform after invoices have been sent to final clients. Therefore, it is an invoice reporting system called the “Continuous Transaction Control” similar to that of South Korea. In fact the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) has helped the Philippines to develop its electronic invoice reporting system.
The electronic invoice includes sales invoices, receipts, debit and credit notes and other similar accounting documents issued through the internet.
Documents must be sent to the BIR via API in real or near real time, but never later than 3 days after the transaction is done. The documents exchanged with the BIR must be in JSON format and a JSON Web Signature must be applied once the documents are validated by the BIR. The BIR is in charge of validating the documents and sending the corresponding acceptance or rejection responses.
The information that an electronic invoice must contain is:
- Document number
- Date of issue
- Unique Identification Number: this is linked to the Document Number to prevent the taxpayer from rejecting or claiming that it is a different sales transaction.
- Seller Information
- Buyer's information
- Details of items/nature of service sold
- Amount of the sale
- VAT
- Discounts
EDICOM’s Global Electronic Invoicing Platform
The EDICOM platform serves as an integration tool for receiving messages from your ERP, transforming them into the BIR's required schema, and adding an electronic signature. To integrate new documents into the ERP, the solution checks for new documents that need to be sent to the BIR on a regular basis. Finally, we have a platform where, if a business must send invoices to the recipient in PDF format, the EDICOM platform automatically publishes the invoices in PDF and notifies the recipient by email so they can download them.
If your company has been selected to participate in the pilot phase, it is essential to start preparing your systems to meet the new requirements. Contact one of our advisors for more information.
