E-invoices: Brings tangible and intangible values

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According to provisions in Decree 119/2018/ND-CP on e-invoices, the e-invoices shall be compulsorily applied to businesses and business households.

Creating a transparent business environment

According to Decree 119/2018/ND-CP guiding the use of e-invoices, the e-invoices shall be compulsorily applied to businesses and business households. Businesses shall only be allowed to use e-invoices instead of the previous paper invoices. For some special cases that cannot use e-invoices, the Tax authority shall order invoice printing to issue or sell them to businesses.

According to financial expert Ngo Tri Long, the e-invoices not only bring tangible values to the businesses but also bring intangible values that cannot be converted into cash. The intangible value is with the opportunity for providing modern, convenient and quick services to customers, contributing to improving businesses’ brand name such as by increasing labor productivity and work efficiency.

Agreeing with this opinion, Ms. Nguyen Thi Cuc, Chairwoman of the Vietnam Tax Consultant Association said that in fact, the low security of using paper invoices has created some huge loopholes for some individuals to establish many different bogus businesses that use invoices, issue blank invoices and use rounded invoices for tax deductions, VAT refunds, trade frauds and tax evasion. This situation not only affects the state budget, creates an unequal business environment, but also greatly affects the legal businesses.

“The e-invoices and e-invoices with authentication code have high security because of using digital signatures, so that it is very difficult to make fake invoices. Therefore, I think that the legal businesses should use e-invoices instead of paper invoices because it is an effective measure to protect themselves against the making of fake invoices,” Ms. Cuc recommended.

According to Mr. Hoang Van Thuan, Chairman of the Board of Directors, General Director of Vietnam EFY Informatics Technology Joint Stock Company, the deployment of the e-invoices instead of paper invoices by the Tax sector has brought benefits to businesses and people. The phrase of e-invoices is no longer strange to many Vietnamese people and businesses because of its benefits. In particular, the Ministry of Finance and the General Department of Taxation required all businesses to officially use e-invoices by 2020, so that the concerns about disagreement, habits and compatibility in the deployment will hardly occur. With a vision to 2020 of the Finance sector, 90% of Vietnamese businesses will use entirely e-invoices instead of paper invoices, which is considered as an inevitable trend of the Industrial Revolution 4.0.

Selecting appropriate software

According to many experts, in order to effectively and widely apply e-invoices and avoid barriers, the new e-invoice software must independently operate with the business administration software and does not depend on any other application.

For this issue, Mr. Hoang Van Thuan said that over the past time, the sales software, accounting software and business administration software did not connect and integrate with e-invoice software, so that businesses had to spend additional costs to synchronize the businesses’ database.

“If a specific and unified regulation is issued for handling this problem, it will reduce additional costs for businesses in using business management software, and at the same time, this is also a motivation and positive factor to support businesses in using e-invoices in the future,” Mr, Thuan said.

Experts Ngo Tri Long also stated that the e-invoice application is a new method and must apply many technological issues so that in order to use e-invoices, the businesses should select legal and reliable digital certificate suppliers to sign service contracts.

“Currently, many organizations have advertised for providing e-invoice service but the businesses cannot distinguish which ones are reliable to sign contracts. Moreover, some criteria that users cannot verify such as technical equipment and systems; capacity of technical personnel; ability to backup and restore data; system safety always has many risks for businesses if errors occur. Therefore, businesses should select reputable and experienced software providers to avoid errors affecting the production and business,” Mr. Ngo Tri Long noted.