For generations, a sale in Vietnam ended with a paper receipt torn from a book, filed in a drawer, and produced — or not — when the tax office came calling. Today that same sale ends with a file: a few kilobytes of structured data, signed, sent to the tax authority, and stored for a decade. E-invoicing in Vietnam has turned the humble receipt into a piece of national infrastructure, and small businesses have had to learn a new routine to keep up.
The change did not arrive as a suggestion. It arrived as law, on a timetable, with the paper invoice losing its legal standing along the way. For a family shop or a two-person company, that can sound intimidating. In practice the routine is simple: register once, pick a provider, and issue each sale’s invoice from a phone or laptop.
From paper books to a file the tax office can read
The legal spine of the change is Decree No. 123/2020/ND-CP, issued on 19 October 2020, which set the rules for invoices and documents in the sale of goods and services. It was followed by Circular No. 78/2021/TT-BTC from the Ministry of Finance, which spelled out formats, registration, and how invoice data travels to the tax authority. Together they set the date that mattered: from 1 July 2022, e-invoices became mandatory for businesses nationwide, and paper invoices stopped being valid for most transactions.
The rollout was deliberately staged. A pilot ran in six provinces and cities from late 2021, then spread to the rest of the country, and by July 2022 every business was expected to be issuing electronic invoices.
An e-invoice is not a scanned copy of a paper one. It is a structured data file, usually in XML format, carrying the seller’s and buyer’s details, the goods or services, the amounts, and the tax. Most invoices are digitally signed by the seller and, in the common “coded” form, carry a verification code issued by the tax authority, which the buyer can check online. The invoice must be stored in its original electronic form for ten years — the same retention period as other accounting records.
What a small business actually has to do
For a small shop, the routine has four steps. First, register to use e-invoices with the managing tax office, using the standard form that names the business, its tax code, the type of invoice it will use, and its chosen software provider. A new company must register right after receiving its tax code, before issuing its first invoice — having no sales yet does not exempt it.
Second, pick an e-invoice software provider. A business cannot connect directly to the tax authority’s system; it works through an authorised provider. The large names in the market include Viettel, VNPT, MISA, BKAV and FPT, and the choice usually comes down to price, whether the software talks to the shop’s existing accounting, and how good the support is when something goes wrong on a busy Saturday.
Third, get a digital signature certificate from a licensed provider, because every e-invoice must be signed by the seller. And fourth, issue an invoice for each sale — from the software, at the moment of the transaction — and let the system send the data to the tax authority, either in real time with a verification code or reported on the same day. Our companion piece on digital signatures in Vietnam explains how that signature works and where else it is used.
The cash-register rule that arrived in 2025
Just as businesses settled into the 2022 rules, a second wave arrived for the shops that sell directly to the public. Decree No. 70/2025/ND-CP, effective from 1 June 2025, amended Decree 123 to require e-invoices generated from cash registers — with the data sent to the tax authority — for a defined set of sellers.
The rule covers household businesses and individuals with annual revenue of 1 billion dong or more, and enterprises selling directly to consumers, in sectors including retail, food and drink, restaurants, hotels, passenger transport, arts, entertainment and recreation, and other personal services. In plain terms, if you sell to the public, your till is now expected to issue a tax-connected e-invoice for every sale.
The invoice from a cash register carries the seller’s details, the buyer, the goods or services, the payment value, and a tax authority code the customer can use to look it up. For the tax office, the point is visibility: sales that once vanished into a paper book now arrive as data in near real time. For the shop, the point is that the till, the invoice and the tax record are now one workflow rather than three.
Why the change is hard for the smallest shops
The system works best for businesses that already keep tidy records. For the smallest shops, the costs are real. There is a software subscription, a digital signature to buy and renew, and time spent learning a new routine — all for a business where the owner is also the cashier, the buyer and the cleaner. An unstable internet connection can hold up a queue, and a mistake in an invoice creates a correction procedure that a paper book never demanded.
There is also a psychological shift. A paper receipt book was private until an inspector asked to see it. An e-invoice system reports sales as they happen, which means the shop’s real revenue is visible every day. Some owners welcome that: a clean digital record makes it easier to borrow, to prove income, and to hand the business to the next generation. Others experience it as a loss of control, and that feeling is part of why adoption among household businesses has needed deadlines and enforcement rather than enthusiasm alone.
Support exists, unevenly. Providers compete on simple interfaces and hotlines, accountants have built a small industry around setup and correction, and the tax authority runs guidance for new registrants.
What this means
E-invoicing in Vietnam is not really a story about invoices. It is a story about what happens when a routine every business performs — recording a sale — becomes data the whole economy can use. The paper receipt served the buyer and the seller. The electronic invoice also serves the tax office, the bank assessing a loan, and the customer who wants proof of purchase years later. That is a genuine gain, and it is why the deadlines kept coming even when small businesses protested.
The lesson for a small business owner is practical rather than grand: register early, choose a provider you can call on a Saturday, and treat the invoice as part of the sale rather than paperwork after it. And the wider pattern is familiar from the rest of Vietnam’s digital shift — the same logic that put a QR code on every market stall and a digital identity in every pocket. Paper fades. The record stays.