Two and a half months have passed since the RO e-Factura rules changed again. From 1 January 2026, invoices must be submitted to the system within 5 business days of issue — not 5 calendar days, as before — and the obligation covers B2B, B2C and B2G, plus invoices issued to non-resident taxable persons registered for VAT in Romania.
On paper, the switch to business days looks like a relaxation. In practice, the inclusion of B2C brings into the system a volume of invoices that many companies were until now managing entirely outside it, with completely different tools and different habits. And the deadline, however you count it, remains a deadline: someone or something has to track it for every single invoice.
This article is for administrators and finance directors who want to know whether their invoicing system keeps up with the 2026 regime — and what exactly needs checking, point by point, before the answer comes from ANAF (the Romanian tax authority).
What changed from 1 January 2026
- The submission deadline: 5 business days from issue, instead of the former 5 calendar days. Weekends and public holidays no longer eat into the deadline — an invoice issued on Friday no longer “burns” two days for nothing.
- B2C: invoices to end consumers enter the system. For retail, services and e-commerce, this is the genuinely structural change.
- Non-residents: the obligation has also been extended to invoices issued to non-resident taxable persons registered for VAT in Romania — relevant if you have foreign clients with a Romanian VAT code.
Why “business days” does not mean relaxation
The change helps the arithmetic, not the discipline. The more generous deadline solves the case of the invoice issued on Friday afternoon, but it does not solve the underlying question: who tracks, invoice by invoice, that the submission actually happened?
In a manual process, the answer is usually “the invoicing person, when they get to it”. Someone exports the file, uploads it to the Spațiul Privat Virtual (the tax authority's online portal), checks whether it passed validation, corrects it if not. At ten invoices a month, that works. At the volume B2C brings, the manual process cannot keep to the deadline even with the best intentions — and it gives way exactly in the busy periods, when invoices are many and people are few.
Holidays are the classic test: the deadline runs regardless of who is away. If submission depends on a single person, you have a single point of failure with a legal deadline attached.
B2C: the genuinely new part
Companies selling to individuals — shops, services, online retail — are now obliged to pass these invoices through the system too. Concretely, this raises three questions for your invoicing infrastructure:
- Does the invoicing program or the e-commerce platform generate the XML file in the required format for individual customers too, with their identification particularities?
- Is the flow automatic, or does someone have to manually “push” each invoice into the system?
- Volume: if you issue tens or hundreds of B2C invoices a month, any manual step turns into hours of repetitive work and into errors.
If you sell through several channels — physical shop, website, marketplace — check each channel separately. Experience shows that it is exactly the “minor” channel, added provisionally at some point, that sends nothing anywhere.
The checklist for your system
- Submission: does the software send invoices to the system automatically, or does it wait for a human action? If it waits, who does it, and who does it when that person is away?
- Validation errors: an invoice rejected by the system must be corrected and resubmitted within the same deadline. Who sees the rejections and how quickly?
- Deadline tracking: is there somewhere a list of invoices issued but not yet submitted, with the number of days remaining? Or do you find out only when it is too late?
- Archiving: where are the submitted XML files and the system's responses kept, and who can find them in two years' time, at an inspection?
- Alerts: does anyone receive a notification when an invoice approaches the deadline without having been submitted? An automatic email costs little and saves a lot.
If terms like XML or API sound foreign, you will find them briefly explained in the glossary of IT terms — you do not need them to run the company, but it helps to know what your software vendor is telling you.
What a correctly automated flow looks like
A healthy e-Factura circuit has six steps, all without human intervention in the happy case: issuing the invoice in the business software, automatic generation of the XML file, local validation before submission (so obvious errors never reach ANAF), the submission itself, monitoring the response with resubmission on temporary errors, and archiving the file together with the proof of submission. People step in only for the exceptions: an invoice rejected on content grounds, a customer with incomplete data.
Many Romanian invoicing programs already have part of this chain. The difference between “it has the feature” and “it works at our company” is made by configuration: the connection to the Spațiul Privat Virtual, access rights, alerts, testing on real cases. For companies with more particular flows — several branches, their own sales platform, integration with an ERP — development and automation services cover exactly this type of link between existing systems and ANAF's requirements, and the frequently asked questions about automation projects show what to expect from such a project.
Fines and risk areas
For dealings with public institutions (B2G), failure to comply is penalised with a fine between 500 and 1,000 lei. For the other segments, penalties depend on the taxpayer's category and the nature of the breach, and the legislative framework is adjusted frequently — check the legislation in force before drawing conclusions from an article, including ours.
The practical risk goes beyond the fine itself, though: invoices stuck in the circuit mean delayed receipts, conversations with clients and hours lost on corrections. The real cost of an unadapted invoicing system does not show up in a penalty notice — it shows up in cash flow, month after month.
The next step: take the checklist above and walk through it with the person who handles invoicing, invoice by invoice, on a case from last month. If the answer to any question is “I don't know” or “it depends who is in the office”, that is where the work is. Neoxis, an IT services company founded in 2015 in Pitești, helps companies across Romania connect their invoicing systems to ANAF's changing requirements.