Every Bolivian business on the Sistema de Facturación Electrónica eventually hits the same moment: a customer is ready to pay, and the system won't issue an invoice. The connection is down, or SIAT isn't responding, or the power went out twenty minutes ago and the router hasn't come back.
The instinct is to improvise — write something by hand, promise to send the factura tomorrow, or simply take the cash and sort it out later. All three create problems that are far more expensive than the outage itself.
Bolivian tax regulation anticipated this. There is a defined procedure for invoicing when the system is unavailable, and businesses that know it in advance handle an outage in minutes. Businesses that don't are the ones reconstructing a week of sales from memory.
Why SFE breaks in the first place
Understanding which component failed determines what you're allowed to do next. There are three distinct scenarios, and they are not interchangeable.
All three are recognized situations, but the documentation you produce and the way you later justify the gap differ. A nationwide SIAT outage is easy to evidence. A failure confined to your own shop puts the burden on you to show what happened and when.
What contingency invoicing actually means
Contingency mode does not mean "stop invoicing." It means you shift to issuing invoices offline, under an authorization your system obtained in advance, and then transmit them to SIN once service is restored.
Three codes do the work, and it's worth knowing what each one is for:
What to do during an outage, step by step
The four mistakes that turn an outage into a fine
1. Handwritten invoices with no fiscal basis
A note on a receipt pad is not an invoice. The customer cannot use it for crédito fiscal, and you have no valid record of the sale. If the customer is a business, you have also just cost them 13% of the purchase — which is how a connectivity problem becomes a client relationship problem.
2. "We'll send the factura tomorrow"
Issuing the invoice on a later date, with a later date on it, misstates when the sale occurred. It shifts revenue into the wrong period and creates a mismatch between your sales records and your declared IVA.
3. Selling without documenting anything
The sale still happened. Cash still entered the business. If the deposit appears in the bank and no invoice corresponds to it, the gap is visible in any reconciliation — and unexplained revenue is a harder conversation than a documented outage.
4. Transmitting late, or not at all
Contingency invoicing is a delay, not an exemption. Offline invoices that are never transmitted look identical to invoices that were never issued. This is the most common failure, because once the crisis passes, nobody remembers there's a queue waiting to be sent.
How to be ready before it happens
An outage is a fifteen-minute inconvenience for a prepared business and a two-week cleanup for an unprepared one. The difference is four things done in advance:
- Make sure contingency authorization is in place and that whoever operates the register knows it exists.
- Test it once. Disconnect the internet deliberately on a quiet afternoon and issue a test invoice. Finding out your contingency path doesn't work is far better on a Tuesday than during a Saturday rush.
- Write down the procedure in one page and keep it physically near the point of sale. The person on shift during the outage may not be you.
- Use a system that queues and transmits automatically so the backlog doesn't depend on someone remembering.
Keep invoicing when the connection doesn't
Native SFE invoicing built for Bolivian conditions — automatic contingency handling, queued transmission, confirmed acceptance. Try it free for 30 days.
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