For four years, Romanian businesses have been told that RO e-Factura is coming. Since 1 July 2026 there is no one left for whom it is still coming. The last deferral—for small taxpayers under €500,000 in annual turnover—expired, and SAF-T now applies to every company regardless of size.
Most of the coverage treats this as a tax story. It is not. Your accountant can tell you which form goes where. What nobody tells you is that these rules quietly changed the requirements for the software you run every day, and that is an engineering problem.
What actually applies right now
The short version, as of September 2026:
- B2B e-invoicing has been mandatory since January 2024 between Romanian VAT-registered entities.
- B2C followed in January 2025.
- Small taxpayers under €500,000 turnover had penalty enforcement deferred to 1 July 2026. That date has passed.
- The transmission window changed on 1 January 2026 from five calendar days to five working days. This is more generous than it sounds—weekends and public holidays no longer eat the deadline.
- SAF-T (D406) is mandatory for all companies in 2026, filed monthly or quarterly depending on your VAT period.
Penalties are tiered by taxpayer size: roughly RON 5,000–10,000 per infringement for large taxpayers, RON 2,500–5,000 for medium, and RON 1,000–2,500 for everyone else. Separately, and far more painfully, issuing or receiving an invoice outside the system carries a penalty of 15% of the invoice value—charged to both sides. A supplier who sends you a paper invoice creates a liability for you, not only for them.
One caution worth stating plainly: these deadlines have moved repeatedly, in both directions. Before making a decision with money attached, confirm the current position with ANAF or your accountant rather than with an article—including this one.
The part that is actually a software problem
A five-working-day transmission window sounds comfortable until you trace where your invoices are born.
In most small and medium businesses, an invoice is not created in one place. A salesperson agrees terms by email. Someone types the lines into an accounting program, possibly from a PDF offer, possibly from a phone call. A delivery note is written separately. At month end, somebody reconciles the three.
That process tolerated errors because there was slack in it. A wrong VAT code discovered two weeks later was corrected quietly. Now the invoice goes to ANAF within five working days, is validated automatically, and is rejected if the structure is wrong. The slack is gone.
So the real question is not "how do I send invoices to e-Factura." Dozens of tools do that. The question is: where does the data come from, and is it correct before it gets there?
Three failure patterns we keep seeing
The data is entered twice
The offer is built in one system and the invoice is retyped into another. Every retyping is a chance to introduce a mismatch between what the client agreed to and what ANAF receives. When the two disagree, the correction is no longer internal—it is a formal correction in a state system.
Product data is not structured well enough
e-Factura wants specific fields: unit of measure, quantity, unit price, VAT rate per line. Businesses that have been writing free-text descriptions on invoices for fifteen years discover that "1 set chairs, as agreed" is not a line item a validator accepts. This is usually the single largest piece of work, and it has nothing to do with e-Factura itself.
Nobody owns the rejections
Invoices get rejected. A validation message arrives, lands in a mailbox nobody watches, and the five working days pass. The penalty is not for sending a wrong invoice—it is for not having sent a correct one in time. A rejection queue with an owner is worth more than any amount of clever integration.
What to fix first
If you are compliant but it hurts every month, the order that pays off fastest is:
First, make one source of truth for products. Codes, units of measure, VAT rates, prices. One list, used by the website, the offers and the invoices. Almost every downstream problem is a symptom of having three versions of this list.
Second, generate the invoice from the document that preceded it. If a client accepted an offer, the invoice should be built from that offer, not typed again. This removes the largest category of mismatch at a stroke.
Third, make rejections visible. A screen, an alert, anything a person will actually see. Not a mailbox rule.
Notice that none of these three is about e-Factura. They are about your own data being correct and entered once. e-Factura simply made the cost of not doing them visible and immediate.
The opportunity hidden in the obligation
Here is the part that is easy to miss while resenting the paperwork. To comply, you were forced to structure your product and transaction data properly. That structured data is exactly what you need for everything else you have been postponing.
Once product lines are clean and machine-readable, generating a priced offer for a client is the same data in a different layout. So is a print-ready catalogue. So are sales reports that previously took a day to assemble. Companies that treated the mandate as a compliance chore have the cost. Companies that treated it as a data cleanup have the cost and the asset.
If you are going to be forced to structure your data, it is worth structuring it once, properly, in a form that serves more than the tax authority.
Compliant, but it costs you a day every month?
Tell us where your invoices actually come from—the emails, the spreadsheets, the retyping—and we'll show you which step is creating the rework. Thirty minutes, no pitch.
Tell us what repeats→Common questions
Who still has to comply with RO e-Factura in 2026?
Everyone. B2B has been mandatory since January 2024 and B2C since January 2025. The deferral of penalty enforcement for small taxpayers under EUR 500,000 turnover ran out on 1 July 2026, and SAF-T (D406) applies to all companies in 2026 regardless of size.
How long do I have to send an invoice to e-Factura?
Five working days from the supply date. This changed on 1 January 2026 from five calendar days, so weekends and public holidays no longer consume the window.
What happens if an invoice is sent outside the system?
Beyond the tiered fines per infringement, issuing or receiving an invoice outside RO e-Factura carries a penalty of 15% of the invoice value — and it applies to both the issuer and the recipient. A supplier sending you a paper invoice creates exposure for you as well.