Electronic invoicing guide
Philippines

Since 1 July 2022, 100 large taxpayers have been required to adopt e-invoicing as a result of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Act (TRAIN). These taxpayers are legally required to issue e-invoices/e-receipts and transmit them in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format to the government portal in real time, or within 3 days from the date of the transaction.

In accordance with the implementation timeline announced by the Philippines Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), all taxpayers were to be be required to transmit invoices to the government portal as of 2024. 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 different sales transaction.
• Seller Information
• Buyer’s information
• Details of items/nature of service sold
• Amount of the sale
• VAT
• Discounts