The Agency's free storage service: signing up, recovering past invoices and managing it over time

Luca registered for VAT as an IT consultant in 2023 and for three years left his invoices on the portal. In October 2026 a client disputes a €2,400 invoice from September 2023. Luca rushes to sign up for the Agency's storage service, hoping to recover everything. The service does accept a start date in the past, just not the one he needs.

Where to find it and how to switch it on

The service belongs to the free tools the Agency provides for preparing, sending, viewing and storing e-invoices. It lives inside the Fatture e Corrispettivi portal, a reserved area accessed with SPID, the National Services Card or the Fisconline or Entratel credentials issued by the Agency.

From the portal's home page you choose the link for e-invoicing and storage, then the one that opens the storage section. A page appears with two documents to read before going further: the Storage Service Manual, which describes the technical process, and the Service Agreement, which has to be signed online.

The manual is not a formality to scroll past. It explains what happens to a file once taken in, how it is kept and how it can be requested later. Anyone who may one day need to produce an original in a dispute is better off knowing from the outset which steps that will involve.

Before signing, it helps to have two pieces of information ready. The first is the date the business started, or at least the year of its first e-invoices. The second is a list of the most important invoices already issued or received. With these, deciding whether to enter a past start date, and which one, takes minutes.

Anyone entering the portal through an intermediary should check that the delegation covers storage. Without it, the accountant can neither sign up for the service nor manage storage on the client's behalf, even while sending invoices from the firm's own software. It is a check to make once, at the start of the professional relationship.

Once signed, the service runs without further steps: invoices passing through the SdI go into storage automatically. Nobody has to upload files by hand or sign them digitally. The Agency's answers state explicitly that the service does not depend on a digital signature on the invoice's XML file.

Recovering invoices already processed

A latecomer like Luca does not start from scratch. When signing, a business can enter a past start date, and every invoice that passed through the SdI from that day onwards will be brought into storage. If no date is given, the service only takes files sent to the SdI from the day after signing.

That past date has a firm limit. It cannot precede 1 January of the second year before the year in which the agreement is signed. A business joining in 2026 can go back to 1 January 2024 at the earliest; one joining in 2027, to 1 January 2025.

The lesson is not that the service is useless but that it pays to join early. Each year of delay moves the earliest recoverable date forward, while the viewing window keeps closing behind you. A business that signs up when it opens its VAT number never faces the problem at all.

A business discovering the gap late still has one option for invoices that the viewing service shows but the recovery cannot reach: download them straight away and hand them to a private storage provider. Time is the decisive factor, because each 31 December removes another year of files from the portal.

The timing of a late sign-up can be reasoned out. In October 2026 the viewing service still shows files received in 2024 and 2025, while the service's recovery reaches back to 1 January 2024. The two windows line up: joining in 2026 with the earliest date leaves no still-visible file uncovered.

The real risk therefore concerns files that have already left the viewing service, such as those from 2023 for a business joining in 2026. There is no way to retrieve them from the portal. What remains are copies downloaded at the time, the accountant's software or the counterparty's archive, all weaker than a stored original.

What the service accepts, and what it does not

The scope is clear-cut. As the Agency's answers point out, the service can by law be used only for e-invoices issued and received through the SdI. Paper invoices, PDFs and documents received through any other channel cannot be uploaded, even when they relate to the same business.

The typical case is a business that once received a non-electronic invoice from a supplier. That document does not enter the Agency's storage: it must be kept under the rules for paper records or entrusted to a private provider. Anyone relying on the public service should know that it covers only part of the archive, however large that part is.

Documents that are not invoices in the strict sense do get in, as long as they travel through the SdI. The Agency mentions, for example, that the TD16 supplement used for domestic reverse charge is brought into storage automatically when the business has joined the service.

Nothing prevents a business from keeping two archives in parallel. The Agency's answers confirm that the same invoice can be stored with more than one provider at once, for example with the public service and with a private company. Many professionals choose exactly that: the free service as a safety net, their software for daily work.

Who answers for storage

By signing up, the business owner, or the legal representative in the case of a company, agrees to be identified as the person responsible for storage. That role follows directly from the decision to join, and it does not pass to whoever physically prepares or sends the invoices.

Day-to-day management, by contrast, can be delegated. From the reserved area, or by filing the form at any Agency office, the holder can grant another person access to the e-invoicing and e-invoice storage service. That is the normal route for anyone working with an accountant or a trade association.

• Prepare and send e-invoices through the SdI using the portal's functions
• Sign up for the storage service on the holder's behalf
• Bring invoices into storage and request that they be produced
• Withdraw from the service and export every invoice stored
• Check the status of the storage service sign-up

Monitoring transmission receipts requires something more: the delegate can access it only if also holding the delegation to view VAT-relevant data. Anyone handing everything to an intermediary should check that both delegations are active, rather than discovering a gap on the very day a receipt is needed.

Producing, withdrawing, exporting

The point of storage shows when you ask for a document back. Among the service's functions is a request to produce stored invoices: that is what provides the original to show a judge, an inspector or a counterparty, with guarantees that a copy from the viewing service does not carry.

The service can also be withdrawn. A business moving to a private provider, or simply reorganising, can export all the invoices stored. Before withdrawing, check that the export is complete and that the new system has taken the files in; otherwise a hole opens in the archive that is hard to fill.

Closing the VAT number does not erase the archive. Asked whether the Agency's storage continues after the business ceases trading, the official answer is short: yes, for fifteen years. That is reassuring for anyone retiring or winding up, who might otherwise fear having to guard years of invoices alone.

Viewing as a control tool

Once storage is active, the viewing service goes back to its real job: daily control. The list of issued invoices shows the latest quarter by default, but another period can be chosen, and a search can run on the counterparty's VAT number or tax code, or on a range of taxable amounts.

Each row shows the essentials: number, date, counterparty, taxable amount, VAT, SdI identifier and whether stamp duty applies. A green tick marks invoices delivered; a red alert marks those that could not be delivered because of a problem with the customer's channel and were left available on the portal, for the recipient to collect.

The red alert matters for storage too. A purchase invoice left available and never collected can slip out of the recipient's books. Checking the section of invoices awaiting collection at regular intervals avoids discovering, months later, a document that should have been booked and stored long before.

The same area also leads to the payment of stamp duty on e-invoices, with lists A and B prepared by the Agency. Stamp duty rules fall outside this course; it is enough to know that those figures come from the same invoices the service brings into storage.

Three possible set-ups and how to choose

In practice there are three routes: the Agency's free service alone, a private storage provider, or both. The public service costs nothing, feeds itself and lasts fifteen years, but it only covers documents that went through the SdI. A private provider can also keep other documents, depending on the contract signed.

For a professional who sends and receives almost nothing but domestic e-invoices, the Agency's service is often enough on its own. For a business with many cross-border transactions, paper documents or archives to bring together, a private provider becomes useful, with the public service kept as a free second copy.

Whatever the choice, two checks apply to everyone. First, know for certain from which date the archive is complete. Second, try at least once to retrieve a document, so as to know how it works before it really matters. An archive that has never been queried is an archive whose workings nobody knows.

A business working with an accountant can simply ask which solution the firm uses for its clients' invoices. The answer should be put in writing, together with the activation date. Those few lines save hours of searching on the day of an audit or a dispute.