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The electronic payment receipt: the document that decides which month you declare VAT in

If you sell on credit and your software does not issue it, you are declaring the VAT in the wrong month. Not too much or too little on purpose — just in a month that was not the right one.

8 min readTicuenta
In one sentence: the electronic payment receipt is the document that supports collecting on a credit invoice. It is one of the seven types in version 4.4, and it is the one that determines which period the VAT on that sale is declared in.

The problem, with numbers

Imagine that on 28 September you invoice a client ₡1,000,000 plus VAT, on 30 days' credit. The client pays you on 28 October.

 Which month the VAT lands in
Without the payment receipt September. You hand the tax over before you have collected it
With the payment receipt October, which is when the money actually came in

With one invoice a month, the difference is a cash-flow problem. With fifty, it is a return that does not match what happened — and a discrepancy that is expensive to explain when someone reviews it.

Why this document exists

Because the moment the obligation to declare VAT arises is not always the moment of the invoice. When the sale is on credit there is a gap between the document and the money, and the rule needs a document that marks the second one.

That document is the payment receipt. It does not replace the invoice: it accompanies it. The invoice documents the sale; the receipt documents the collection.

Who actually needs it

If any of these describes your business, you need it:

  • You sell on credit to other businesses.
  • You collect in instalments, or on account.
  • You have clients who pay at 30, 60 or 90 days.
  • You invoice against work progress and collect afterwards.

If you sell everything for immediate payment — retail, a restaurant, services paid on the spot — you will never use it. And that is fine: it is why many invoicing products do not include it and their customers never miss it.

The sale condition that makes it work

This is the part that gets missed. The receipt only works if the original invoice carried the right sale condition: code 10, a credit sale under the 90-day VAT rule, which rests on article 27 of the VAT Act. Without that condition on the invoice, the VAT was already due in the month of the invoice and the receipt changes nothing.

And the receipt itself admits only two conditions. Codes 09 — payment for services rendered to the State — and 11 — payment of a credit sale under the 90-day rule. Any other code on a payment receipt is a straight rejection.

What to ask your software

  • Does it issue the payment receipt at all? It is the most commonly missing of the seven types.
  • Does it let you set condition 10 on the invoice? Without that, the receipt has nothing to attach to.
  • Does it handle partial collections? A client who pays half is the normal case, not the exception.
  • Does the VAT return follow the receipts? Issuing the document and then declaring on the invoice date anyway defeats the point.
From Ticuenta

The VAT lands in the month you collected

Ticuenta issues the payment receipt when you record the collection, and the monthly figures follow it — so a credit sale is declared when the money came in, not before.

See how it works

About this article. The 90-day credit sale rule and its effect on when the tax is due come from article 27 of the VAT Act; the document type, its admitted sale conditions and the rejection rule, from the version 4.4 annex.

Verified as of 24 September 2026. Tax rules change. This is information, not tax advice.

Sources: Current legal texts (Sinalevi) Ministry of Finance

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