Spanish Tax Agency software certification: Digitized invoices with legal value

A truly comprehensive Accounts Payable solution should support all invoice incoming channels (including both electronic and paper invoices) while benefiting from electronic invoices archiving.

To allow electronic archiving of paper invoices (with the option to destroy the paper originals), invoice scanning must be compliant with legal requirements, so that digital copies have full legal validity.

Maybe in the future, the requirements for certified scanning will be unified across the European Union, but nowadays only a small number of countries have legal requirements to allow paper documents to be digitized preserving their legal value.

Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria (AEAT), the Spanish Tax Agency, has the required regulation in place and holds the authority to approve homologation of Certified Digitization software.

The AEAT homologation process requires the application developer to present an audit report  and other documents to allow AEAT experts to assess the validity of the proposed solution. Call 902 365 612 or +34 91 716 0555 if you need additional information regarding the audit process.

With approved solutions all digitized invoices or other equivalent documents such as tickets or simplified invoices have the same legal validity as paper originals. This allows companies relying on a certified scanning approved solution to destroy paper versions, and benefiting from easier management and cost reductions.

Te basic regulation for certified scanning is defined in Article 7 of Order EHA / 962/2007 of 10th April 2007 and related Tax Agency Resolution of 24th October 2007.

The Certified Digitization process converts the image on a paper document into a digital image secured with an electronic siganture. To comply with Tax oriented digitization regulation, the process must ensure integrity by fully unattended scanning, inserting required metadata and automatically signing the generated files with a valid electronic certificate.

The invoice has to be stored in a digital repository that also fulfills strong integrity requirements (write once, read many) and digitization process control and all invoices should be available without undue delay in case of an audit.

Proper certified digitization systems allow to redesign, streamline and automate processing of documents. These solutions eliminate additive inefficiency by automated data capture from multi-channel (paper, email, OCR, EDI), electronic routing, passing collected data through the process, integration with ERPs solutions.

Advantages of integrated solutions:

• Reduction of administrative work thanks to automation
• Reduction of costs related to paper processing and storage.
• Easy access and quick search results thanks to the document management
  
• Streamlining the approval process of the Invoices, benefiting providers with faster payments