This article is a simplified, illustrative description and not legal advice. Rules, dates and technical details change, so always rely on official publications for your obligations.
The general idea
Verifiable invoicing schemes ask billing software to keep a tamper-evident record of each invoice. Every record includes a fingerprint of the previous one, so removing or editing an old invoice breaks the chain in a way that can be detected.
Typical building blocks
- A hash chain linking each invoice record to the one before
- A QR code on the invoice that lets a customer check it
- Optional submission of records to the tax authority as they are issued
- Software that cannot silently delete or rewrite history
What teams usually do
Most companies do not want to build and certify this themselves. They send invoice data to a provider that creates the record, adds the QR code, submits where required and returns the status. The important design point is idempotency: retrying a request must never create a second record.