e-Factura deadlines run from the moment the document reaches the Virtual Private Space, not from the moment you see it. That is the difference that costs money: an invoice that arrived on Monday and was seen three weeks later has already used up the window for contesting it and, if ANAF rejected it, it does not count as submitted at all.
The five working days for submission
The supplier has five working days from the invoice issue date to submit it into the e-Factura system. The deadline is counted from issue, not from delivery of the goods or from the moment the customer confirms anything, and exceeding it is an offence distinct from any other tax obligation.
In practice the hard part is not the submission but what happens afterwards: ANAF validates the invoice and may reject it. A rejected invoice is not a submitted invoice. If the rejection goes unnoticed, the deadline keeps running as though nothing had happened.
Mind this
A rejected invoice is not a submitted invoice. The five-day deadline keeps running, and if the rejection goes unnoticed it expires without anybody finding out.
What "it arrived in SPV" means for deducting VAT
For the buyer, an invoice received through e-Factura counts as communicated the moment it becomes available in SPV. The copy the supplier emails you, however promptly, does not carry the same weight: the original is the one in the system.
The consequence is direct. The right to deduct is exercised in the period in which the invoice was received — and if nobody looked in SPV that month, the invoice exists without being recorded. It can be corrected, but through adjustments that cost accountant time and the attention of an inspection.
Error reports: the document nobody goes looking for
When ANAF rejects an invoice, what appears in SPV is a document of type "invoice errors", not a warning email. It is the only sign that the submission failed, and it is easy to miss because it looks like every other message in the list.
This is where the loss of money is most direct: you believe you have invoiced, the customer has nothing to pay because they have no invoice, and the five-day deadline expired long before you find out. A daily check of SPV catches this on the day it happens.
What fines are provided for
Failing to submit within the deadline is penalised as an administrative offence, with fines graded by taxpayer category — larger for large taxpayers, smaller for small ones, but never negligible against the cost of a check. The exact amounts are changed by ordinance, which is why we do not repeat them here: check them in the text in force on the date of the act.
More important than the amount is that the penalty applies per invoice, not per month. A month in which nobody looked in SPV does not mean one fine, but potentially one for every document missed.
What can actually be done
The only measure that changes anything is not to depend on somebody remembering to log into SPV. Either somebody checks daily, as a task with a name and an hour attached, or the check is automated.
Alerte SPV does the second: we query SPV for each of your tax numbers and email you on the day a new document appears — including for the error reports, which are exactly the ones nobody goes looking for. You can start free, with a single tax number.