What is FBR digital invoicing?

1. You raise the invoice in your own system. Buyer, items, quantities, values, tax. Your own invoice number stays with you — it still belongs on the printed document and in your books.
2. Your software assembles it in FBR’s structure. One header — who is selling, who is buying, the date, the document type — and one entry for each line on the invoice.
3. You can send it for a dry run first. FBR publishes a validation method that takes the identical invoice, runs the same checks and returns the same errors without creating any record. Nothing is filed and no number is issued. It is the cheapest way to catch a bad HS code before the invoice becomes permanent.
4. You submit it, one invoice at a time, as it is generated. FBR’s guidance is explicit that bulk upload is not permitted and invoices must be transmitted in real time. There is no daily cap on how many you send.
5. FBR validates and answers immediately. If the invoice passes, the response carries an FBR invoice number plus a number for every line. If it fails, the error comes back against the field or line that caused it.
6. That number has a readable structure. Your registration number, then the letters DI, then a 13-digit timestamp. FBR’s own example, 7000007DI1747119701593, decodes to 13 May 2025 at 12:01:41 Pakistan time — the moment FBR accepted it, not the moment you raised it.
7. Reading the answer correctly is part of the job. A rejected invoice still arrives over a perfectly successful connection, and FBR’s documentation shows a response whose top-level status reads as accepted while the real rejection sits against one line. An invoice is only filed if a non-empty FBR invoice number came back and every line reports clean.
8. Your software builds the QR code and prints the document. The QR code is generated from the FBR invoice number and carries nothing else — no prices, no buyer details. It is a pointer into FBR’s records, so scanning it without checking against FBR proves nothing on its own.
9. The invoice flows into your sales tax return by itself. Annexure-C is auto-filled from the electronic invoices you have issued. An invoice moves into the return 72 hours after posting, or at month end, whichever comes first — so an invoice raised late on the last day of the month has hours of correctability, not three days.
10. You keep the record for six years, in a form that can be rebuilt. The rules require the stored document to be capable of re-creating the information as it was at the time of original transmission. A folder of PDFs does not obviously meet that; what you sent and what FBR sent back does.

When a submission fails

There is no automatic retry anywhere in the system, so a failed invoice sits there until someone resubmits it. Two situations need care.

No answer came back. FBR sometimes accepts an invoice without the response reaching you. There is no duplicate protection on submission, so resubmitting blindly can create a second live invoice — which then has to be cancelled out of a limited monthly allowance. Search for the invoice before sending it again.

A genuine outage. Invoices issued while the service is down must be marked as issued in offline mode and uploaded within 24 hours of service being restored, and the failure reported to the Board and the concerned Commissioner within 24 hours. This is the only tolerance in the system.