VeriFactu for hospitality: getting your bar or restaurant POS compliant in Spain

VeriFactu for hospitality: getting your bar or restaurant POS compliant in Spain

If you run a bar, restaurant or café in Spain, the invoicing anti-fraud regulation (Royal Decree 1007/2023) now applies to you in full: it has been in force for companies since 1 January 2026 and for self-employed workers since 1 July 2026. The point many hospitality owners miss is simple: your POS terminal is legally an invoicing system (a SIF, in the Spanish terminology). If it prints receipts, it falls under the regulation — this is not just about "accounting software".

The receipt is a simplified invoice — and it now carries a QR code

Hospitality runs almost entirely on simplified invoices: the ordinary till receipt. Under the regulation, every receipt must come from a compliant system that creates a billing record chained with a SHA-256 hash, prints a mandatory QR code on the receipt itself, and keeps a tamper-proof event log.

The QR code lets the customer verify the receipt with the Spanish tax agency (AEAT). For a venue handling hundreds of transactions a day, the practical consequence is that your POS software must generate and chain records at service speed — no slowdowns during the lunch rush.

Kitchen orders and pre-bills are not invoices

A recurring question in the sector: what about the kitchen order ticket or the pre-bill left on the table so the customer can check the total? Neither is an invoice, and neither creates a billing record. The record is created when the final receipt is issued at payment.

That said, be careful with old habits. Using pre-bills as a stand-in for the real receipt is exactly the kind of loophole the anti-fraud rules were designed to close. The system must issue the actual simplified invoice when the customer pays, and the event log records how the software is used. Running the till "open drawer" without issuing receipts is no longer a cheap shortcut.

Shifts, cash-ups and high transaction volume

Daily cash-ups and shift changes do not disappear — they remain your internal controls. What changes is that fiscal traceability no longer depends on the end-of-day close: it depends on the chaining of every single record at the moment of issue. Each receipt is cryptographically linked to the previous one, so deleting or inserting transactions afterwards breaks the chain and becomes visible.

If you operate several terminals (bar, terrace, dining room), the software must keep numbering and chaining consistent across all of them.

Typical mistakes in hospitality

• Keeping a legacy, non-compliant POS: using non-compliant software carries fines of up to €50,000 per financial year (Article 201 bis of the Spanish General Tax Law).
• "Deleting" receipts to fix errors: corrections must be made through registered cancellations and corrective invoices, never by removing records.
• Treating the pre-bill as the receipt: the bill left on the table does not replace the simplified invoice issued at payment.
• Forgetting full invoices: when a business customer asks for an invoice with their tax details, the system must issue and record it just like any receipt.

Why the VeriFactu mode suits hospitality

The regulation offers two operating modes. In non-VeriFactu mode, you keep signed records and the event log locally and must hand them over if the AEAT requests them. In VeriFactu mode, the system transmits every billing record to the AEAT continuously, at the moment of issue, on a voluntary basis.

For hospitality, VeriFactu is usually the smarter choice: less local custody burden, a stronger presumption of compliance during any inspection, and receipts whose QR code shows the record is already with the tax agency. In a sector that has traditionally attracted scrutiny, continuous submission is the simplest way to prove everything is in order.

What to do this week

Ask your POS provider one direct question: does the system produce chained records, QR codes and an event log under RD 1007/2023, and in which mode does it operate? If the answer is vague, it is time to switch. The regulation is no longer coming — it is here.