Verifactu and E-Invoicing: What It Means for Your Website

If you sell in Spain, you have probably had an email warning that invoicing is about to change and you must buy something immediately. Some of that is true and most of the urgency is manufactured. Here is what is actually happening and what part of it touches your website.

Two different things, constantly confused

Verifactu is about the software that issues invoices. Spain requires billing systems to be verifiable: every invoice gets a chained fingerprint and a QR code, records cannot be deleted or altered without leaving a trace, and the system can report to the tax agency. It applies to B2B and B2C alike.

Mandatory B2B e-invoicing, from the Ley Crea y Crece, is about the format and channel. Invoices between businesses must be structured electronic documents exchanged through digital channels — not a PDF attached to an email.

They are separate obligations with separate timetables, which is the root of most of the confusion. You can be affected by one and not the other.

The dates, as they currently stand

For Verifactu: 1 January 2027 for companies, and 1 July 2027 for self-employed people and other taxpayers.

For mandatory B2B e-invoicing under Crea y Crece: the start has been pushed to 1 October 2027, deliberately, to avoid it landing on top of Verifactu.

Two things worth saying plainly. First, these dates have moved before, more than once. Second, a great deal of marketing has claimed both were already in force — they are not. If someone is telling you that you are currently non-compliant, check the date they are citing.

What this means for your website

For most business websites: nothing. If your site is a brochure, a portfolio or a lead-generation site, and invoices are issued afterwards from your accounting software, this is your accountant's problem and your software vendor's problem, not your website's.

It matters when your website is the thing that issues the invoice. Three cases:

A shop that generates invoices automatically. If a customer buys and the platform emails an invoice, that platform is a billing system. It has to meet the Verifactu requirements — fingerprint, QR, immutable records — by the relevant date. In practice, this means checking that whoever supplies your shop platform has committed to it, in writing, with a date.

A booking or subscription site that bills customers. Same reasoning. If the software creates the invoice, the software is in scope.

A site that pushes orders into a billing system. Here the site is not the billing system; the connected system is. What you need to confirm is that the integration still works once that system changes, because a Verifactu-compliant version may have a different API.

What to do now

Not much, and none of it urgent, but it is worth doing before 2027 rather than in December 2026.

1. Work out whether your website issues invoices at all. Many owners are not sure. If the customer receives a document called an invoice and your site sent it, the answer is yes.
2. Ask your platform or plugin supplier one question in writing: what is your plan and date for Verifactu compliance? A serious supplier already has a published answer. Silence is informative.
3. Ask your accountant which of the two rules applies to you and when. They deal with this daily and they know your legal form and customer mix.
4. If you invoice other businesses, note the October 2027 date and ask how invoices will be exchanged.
5. Do not buy anything yet on urgency alone. The dates are far enough away that panic purchases are unnecessary, and the products are still changing.

Where the website genuinely helps

There is an upside worth taking. When invoicing becomes structured and automated, the weak link becomes the data you collected at the point of sale. An invoice needs a correct legal name, a valid NIF, and a proper address. If your checkout collects a first name and an email, someone will be chasing those details by hand for every B2B order.

Adding a business-customer path to checkout — company name, NIF with basic format validation, billing address — is a small change now and saves a lot of manual work later. It also reduces rejected invoices, which is a real cost.

The same applies to your contact and quote forms if that is where business relationships start.

For Dutch and other EU companies

If you sell into Spain from the Netherlands, whether you are caught depends on where you are established and where the transaction is taxed — genuinely a question for a tax adviser, not a blog.

The wider point is that this is not only Spanish. Structured e-invoicing is moving across the EU, with ViDA pushing towards digital reporting for cross-border transactions later this decade. Countries are arriving at it on their own timetables. If you sell across borders, the direction of travel is clear even where your national date is not yet set.

The summary

Two rules, two dates, mostly your accountant's territory. Your website matters only if it is the thing that issues invoices — and if it is, the useful action today is one written question to your platform supplier, not a purchase.

The one improvement worth making regardless: collect proper billing details at the point of sale. That pays off whatever the final dates turn out to be.

This is a practical summary, not tax or legal advice, and the timetable has changed before. Confirm your own obligations with your gestor or asesor fiscal, or check the AEAT's published guidance.