What the directive is
The directive governs two things at once: how an electronic invoice is issued, registered and corrected, and who is allowed to sell the software that does it. Most of its length is about the second. A sales register system has to be accredited before a taxpayer may lawfully use it, and the conditions on the supplier run to security clearance, a performance guarantee and a checksum proving the code has not changed since it was approved.
For a restaurant, that division matters. Most of the obligations the directive creates fall on whoever built the system, not on the business ringing sales into it. What falls on the business is narrower and more practical.
Who it applies to
Article 19(1) makes a compliant electronic sales register mandatory for every taxpayer who keeps books of accounts under the tax law. That is the test, and it is worth being precise about: it is not turnover, and it is not sector. A taxpayer below the books-of-accounts threshold is outside the mandate and may still adopt one voluntarily, which the same article permits in as many words.
Annex 2 lists the sectors the Authority has in view. Restaurants and beverage service are both on it.
When it starts
This is the question every owner asks and the honest answer is that the directive does not contain one. Article 29 says implementation "shall be carried out in accordance with the schedule issued by the Authority", and that schedule has not been published for this sector. The Board is separately empowered to issue the timetable suppliers and taxpayers follow.
So the directive is in force and the obligation is not yet switched on for cafés and restaurants. Anyone quoting a firm commencement date for the sector today is quoting something that has not been published.
What a compliant system has to do
Article 4 sets the conditions a sales register system is licensed against. They bind the system rather than the restaurant, but they are worth knowing, because they are what a restaurant is buying when it buys a system that can be used lawfully:
- The taxpayer’s own identifiers on the document: TIN, VAT registration where the business is registered, the fiscal slip number and the machine registration code.
- An audit log of the operations performed and who performed them, exportable for an inspection.
- Role-based access, so a waiter and a cashier are not the same account.
- Encrypted communication and a digital signature over what is transmitted.
- Geo-fencing where the point of sale is mobile.
VAT is a separate instrument and is unchanged by any of this. Fifteen per cent is set by the VAT Proclamation, it applies to VAT-registered businesses only, and it applied before this directive and applies now.
What happens when the line goes down
Article 22 is the one to read twice, because it is where a restaurant is most likely to fall out of compliance without noticing. The system may fall back to manual invoices while registration is unavailable. Every one of those invoices then has to be registered with the Authority within 72 hours of the connection returning, quoting its own number.
Seventy-two hours is short, it runs from the moment the system can register again rather than from when the invoice was written, and nothing about it is automatic. A restaurant that writes twenty paper invoices during an outage owes twenty registrations, and the clock on all of them starts together.
What to do about it now
Nothing about the commencement date is in a restaurant’s control, and there is no advantage in acting before the Authority names one. What is worth doing is the part that takes time regardless: knowing your four identifiers and having them recorded correctly, keeping the records the directive expects you to be able to produce, and satisfying yourself that whoever supplies your sales register is going to be accredited when the day comes. A system that is not accredited is not one you may lawfully sell through, and that is the supplier’s problem to solve before it becomes yours.
This is a summary written for restaurant owners, not legal advice. The directive is the authority on itself, and your accountant or the Ministry of Revenues is the authority on how it applies to your business.