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Comment by dawkins | Hacker News Reader

Invoicing gets even better in countries like Portugal, where you have to send to the tax authorities every invoice that you generate.

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In Italy too. They specifically developed an XML format for that, and each time you issue an invoice you have to (well, with some exceptions, but they are gradually removing all of them) send a copy to the revenue agency, which will forward it to the recipient (and keep a copy).

While it is a bit inconvenient, though, I don't think it is a bad idea. I am pretty sure it helps a lot making the life harder for people evading taxes, and to some extent the availability of a standard machine-readable format makes it easy to do accounting. My wife sells videocourses online and I developed a thing that automatically issues invoices as soon as people buy a product (with some human supervision, mainly to avoid the machine doing havoc is some exceptional situation happens; normally it is just "click a button to send the invoice"). The invoices are then automatically available to the accountant for doing accountant things.

You can find the XSD here: https://www.fatturapa.gov.it/en/norme-e-regole/documentazion...

They should rather give a service to issue /cancel an invoice and people will happily use the service

Not sure it is a good idea. It might be more flexible when you issue an invoice and have to modify it, but first it would enable fraud, and second it would mean that you have to monitor incoming invoices to see if anything changed and account for that. I think it's better to ask people to just emit correct invoices: if you need to invoice a bit more you issue another one, if you need to invoice less you issue a credit note. If you can't do that you need to work on your business processes.

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