Verifactu and SMEs: one more year of leeway is not the same as a solved problem

The second postponement of Verifactu has been received with relief in almost all firms and in almost all SMEs. The relief is understandable and, in part, deserved: changing the program you use for invoicing is not like changing your phone provider, and doing it in a rush in the middle of a financial year is the fastest way to end up issuing invoices incorrectly. An extra year of leeway avoids that. What it does not avoid is everything else.

THE COST DOES NOT DISAPPEAR, IT IS POSTPONED

The obligation will come all the same: 1 January 2027 for Corporate Tax payers and 1 July 2027 for the rest. Anyone who invoices with a spreadsheet, with an old unsupported program or with an in-house development made ten years ago will have to replace it or hire someone to adapt it. No specific deduction offsets that expense, and for a business of two or three people it is not negligible.

There is also an invisible cost that almost nobody accounts for: time. Migrating a history of clients, invoicing series and invoice formats consumes weeks of the time of the person who also has to attend to customers. In a large company that is done by a department. In an SME it is done by the owner, at night.

THE RISK IS POORLY DISTRIBUTED

What worries me most is the allocation of responsibilities. Article 201 bis of the General Tax Law imposes a penalty of 50,000 euros per year for the mere possession of a non-compliant system, and 150,000 euros for the manufacture or marketing of such systems. The first fine is paid by the user; the second, by the manufacturer. The problem is that compliance is determined by the design of the program, not by the user, who has no reasonable way of auditing a binary.

The responsible declaration that the regulation requires from the producer is the mechanism intended to resolve this, and it is advisable to request it and file it. But a responsible declaration is not a certificate issued by the Administration: if the program turns out not to comply, the business owner will have to argue their diligence in a sanctioning procedure that starts with a five-figure amount on the table.

WHAT IT WOULD BE REASONABLE TO ASK FOR

I do not dispute the goal. An unalterable and traceable invoicing record is a legitimate tool against fraud, and those who invoice everything they collect have nothing to fear from it. I dispute the proportionality. Three things would make this transition much less burdensome without touching the substance of the regulation: a public and searchable registry of programs declared compliant, so that the business owner can check in thirty seconds what they are using; a real gradation of the penalty for possession, which today is a fixed fine identical for a two-hundred-employee consulting firm and for a hairdresser; and an initial support period in which the first incident is corrected instead of punished.

My practical recommendation for the coming months is the opposite of what the postponement invites: do not wait. Request the declaration of conformity from the provider now, set a migration date before the summer of 2027 and test issuing in parallel. The leeway exists precisely to use it calmly, not to waste it.