Romanian e-Factura: the foreign founder's guide to mandatory e-invoicing

Romania went further than most EU countries on e-invoicing, and the system changes how accounting errors surface: they are visible to ANAF before your accountant closes the month. Here is what you need to know.

e-Factura is the national electronic invoicing platform operated through ANAF and its online portal, SPV. Instead of an invoice being a PDF exchanged between two companies, the invoice is transmitted to the national system in a structured format — and for the transaction types in scope, the version inside the system is the one that legally counts. B2B invoicing is mandatory, and the scope has been extended in stages rather than switched on all at once.

The system is one of several through which ANAF now receives business data continuously — alongside SAF-T reporting and the filings in SPV. Together they mean Romanian compliance is verified against data the authority already holds, not just against what you declare.

• —Your invoices legally exist in the system — issuing a document that never reaches e-Factura is not a technicality for in-scope flows.
• —Your books must reconcile with the system: what ANAF sees and what your accounting shows have to match.
• —Received invoices matter too — supplier invoices arrive in the system whether or not anyone downloads and books them.
• —Errors surface fast: a mismatch is visible to the authority long before a tax inspection would have found it in the past.

In practice, e-Factura removes the old buffer between what a company does and what the tax authority knows. That is manageable — but only if someone is actually watching. The obligations around it sit inside the wider compliance calendar mapped in our SRL requirements checklist.

A properly run monthly service treats e-Factura as a live feed, not a year-end reconciliation. Issued invoices are checked against the system, received invoices are pulled down and booked, and discrepancies are raised with you in the same month they appear. At Conion this monitoring is part of every package — see what our service covers — because a system ANAF reads in real time deserves an accountant who reads it just as often.

• —Invoices issued outside the system — often from a foreign invoicing tool nobody connected to e-Factura.
• —Received invoices never collected: supplier invoices sit in the system unbooked, so the books and the system quietly diverge.
• —Nobody assigned: the owner assumes the accountant watches the system, the accountant assumes the owner does.
• —Access lost during an accountant switch, leaving weeks of invoices unmonitored — the handover step most often skipped.

The last two are organisational, not technical — and they are the ones that generate real cleanup work. If you are inheriting this situation from a previous firm, our switch-accountant process includes an e-Factura and SPV access check as a standard step, and the portal itself is explained in our SPV guide.