Italy's electronic receipts duty: who carries it, which tools, what deadlines

Sara is opening a small ice-cream shop in Lecce: takings of 300 € to 900 € a day, almost never an invoice. The till supplier pushes an off-the-shelf model; her brother-in-law, a plumber, says he manages with his phone alone. Both are right, for different trades. Her first decision is which tool can keep pace with an ice-cream counter on a July evening.

From fiscal receipt to commercial document

For decades Italian shopkeepers proved their takings with a scontrino fiscale or a ricevuta fiscale. The Agenzia delle Entrate guide explains that electronic receipts began replacing both on 1 July 2019, and that from 1 January 2021 the switch has been complete for every business concerned.

What the customer now receives is a documento commerciale. It can be produced in only two ways: with a registratore telematico, a telematic till known as an RT, or with a web procedure that the Agenzia provides at no charge. An old-style fiscal cash register can no longer certify sales on its own.

For the buyer, little changes. The commercial document carries no tax value, but it can be kept as a warranty record, to exchange goods or as proof of purchase. The tax value has moved elsewhere: into the data file the till sends to the Agenzia when the shop closes for the day.

Who has to record and transmit

The rule covers retail trade and similar activities, meaning sales and services for which an invoice is not compulsory unless the customer asks for one. The test is the kind of transaction, not the business sector: what matters is that the buyer is normally a final consumer.

Besides shops, the guide names those who used to issue fiscal receipts for services: craftsmen, hotels, restaurants. A hairdresser, a café, a hardware store or an electrician working in private homes all fall inside. A firm that always invoices, because it only deals with other businesses, stays in the e-invoicing world instead.

• retail shops of every kind, from grocers to clothing stores
• cafés, restaurants, pizzerias, ice-cream parlours and other public premises
• hotels and other accommodation that used to issue fiscal receipts
• craftsmen working for private customers, such as plumbers, electricians and joiners
• personal services, such as hairdressers and beauticians

The start was staggered. The duty applied from 1 July 2019 to businesses whose 2018 turnover exceeded the threshold shown below, and from 1 January 2020 to everyone else. For the smaller operators, the grace period was then pushed back by the Rilancio decree to 1 January 2021.

Exempt transactions

Not every payment must be recorded. A ministerial decree of 10 May 2019 lists the exempt transactions. First among them are those that never required a receipt in the past; the guide gives taxi rides and newspaper sales as examples of that older exemption carried over.

Collective public transport of passengers, with their vehicles and luggage, is also exempt, as are transactions on board ships, aircraft or trains during an international journey. A newsagent who also sells toys and souvenirs must sort the two: the exemption covers the papers, not the rest of the shelf.

Two tools: the telematic till and the web procedure

Recording and sending must go through tools that keep the data unalterable and secure. There are two of them. The first is the telematic till: in short, a cash register able to connect to the internet, sold in several versions, fixed or portable, to suit each trader's way of working.

The technical requirements for an RT were laid down by an Agenzia measure of 28 October 2016. Buy one from an authorised dealer and choose the right format: a market trader needs a portable unit, a supermarket several linked checkouts. The Agenzia publishes the list of manufacturers holding approval for their models.

The RT records each transaction and prints the commercial document for a sale, a return or a cancellation. When the till is closed for the day, it builds the file of aggregated takings without any action by the trader, seals it electronically and sends it securely to the Agenzia delle Entrate's system.

Those three document types are not a detail. A sale document goes with the payment; a return document records goods brought back and money handed over; a cancellation voids a line keyed in by mistake. Using them, rather than adjusting the day's total by hand, is what keeps the transmitted data in line with the real cash drawer.

The second tool is the web procedure called documento commerciale online. It lives in the Fatture e Corrispettivi portal on the Agenzia's website, runs on phones and tablets as well, and is free. There is nothing to buy: the trader needs login credentials for the reserved area and a working connection.

One practical point separates the two. An RT can record and print documents with no network at all and send the file only at closing time, retrying until it succeeds. That makes it suited to places with a patchy signal, such as a beach kiosk or a workshop behind thick old walls in a town centre.

Choosing the right tool

The guide's yardstick is simple: how often you sell. A business that rang up many receipts a day, like a café, or produced receipts in batches from management software, will find the telematic till the obvious choice. It prints in a second and keeps working offline until closing.

A trader who used a handwritten carbon receipt book, like a plumber or a joiner, may prefer the web procedure. There is time to fill in the document on a phone in front of the customer. The catch is that the connection must work at that very moment, because the procedure cannot record anything offline.

The two can be combined. A shop with an RT at the counter and a technician doing home repairs or deliveries can record the outside jobs through the web procedure. The Agenzia's system then adds up the data from both channels and shows a single total in the Fatture e Corrispettivi portal.

When to record and when to send

Each transaction must be recorded when it is completed or carried out, which means at payment or at delivery of the goods. By that same moment the customer must be handed the document proving it, unless they asked for a digital copy. Adding up the day's sales from memory at closing time does not comply.

Sending the data follows a different logic. With an RT, the trader only has to make sure the device is online at least when the till is closed. After closing it tries to reach the Agenzia's servers and, once the channel is open, transmits the sealed file for the day.

If the line is down at closing, there are twelve days to put it right. The trader can reconnect the RT, or copy the sealed file to external storage such as a USB stick and load it through the upload function of the Fatture e Corrispettivi portal. The guide calls this the emergency procedure.

Closing days, holidays and dormant periods

On days when the shop is shut, nothing is keyed into the till. The RT itself reports the closed days to the Agenzia with its first transmission after reopening. A weekly rest day or a long bank-holiday weekend therefore calls for no action at all by the trader.

A break of more than twelve days is different: long holidays, a seasonal closure, a device left unused, or a pause whose length is unknown. Here it is wise to tell the Agenzia in advance by setting the RT out of service with code 608, which stands for storage or a dormant period.

The device returns to service by itself with the next transmission. A seasonal ice-cream shop closing from October to March sets code 608 on its last trading day and does nothing more: when it reopens in spring, the first file sent reactivates the till without any further paperwork.

What the system saves you

The duty brings some simplifications with it. The takings register no longer has to be kept, because electronic recording and transmission replace the daily write-up of sales. Copies of the commercial documents handed to customers need not be stored either, unlike the stubs of the old receipt books.

The Agenzia receives the data promptly and makes it available again, through free services, to the trader or their adviser, as support for VAT settlements and the annual return. An RT owner no longer keeps a service logbook: inspection records are sent by the device and can be viewed in the portal.

Upkeep costs fall as well. Periodic inspection, yearly for old cash registers, becomes every two years. Anyone using the web procedure stops buying receipt books. For a single shop these are modest amounts, but they recur every year and partly offset the price of the till.

One duty remains that no device performs by itself: checking. At least once a month, open the portal and compare the transmitted totals with what actually went into the till and the bank. A missing day spotted that way is usually still inside the twelve-day window, when it can be fixed without consequences.