From March 2015 the so called “fatturazione elettronica” has become compulsory for all the suppliers of the public administration. A big step toward the “e-government”, and a real pain in the ass for all of us, desperate managers of small business allover Italy.

What has to do the “fatturazione elettronica” with Scuola Toscana ? Well, for example, Scuola Toscana organizes courses for classes of  students from public schools in Alto Adige (a German speaking part of Italy) , therefore is paid for those services by the public schools of that region.

Until March 2015 it was quite easy, Scuola Toscana issued a regular, numbered and dated invoice, sent it to the school in Alto Adige and received the money. Piece of cake.

But now, the world has changed, and the “fatturazione elettronica” is here: how does it works ?

First of all, you have to get an address of “posta certificata”, which is a special email address to communicate to whomever in an “official way” (you have to register your firm and buy the address by an Internet provider)

Then, you have to register your firm by a special portal (a private business, there are many of them available over the Internet). In order to do it, you have first to enrole yourself as a person, then you receive a password and you can enrole your firm.

To register your firm, you need the usual list of information (chamber of commerce number, fiscal code, social capital, etc.) plus some more information that must be provided by your accountant (call the accountant, fix a meeting, retrieve the data…)

You fill a form with all these information, send them, and you gain access to  the contract between your business and  the specialized portal (which from now on can handle and conserve your invoices, with a special and totally different progressive number). Print the contract,  sign it, and send it by mail/fax AND per regular slow mail. All of this considering that in Firenze centro the Internet works irregularly (especially around 12h and 19 h)

We are at this point of the process, at the moment…

After that, we should be able to pay 30 euros to the specialized portal and get a carnet of 6 invoices’slot, then we can write the invoices as before, send them to this specialized portal so that they can transform our invoices in electronic format and send them to the public administration.

Which should pay us in due time.

It is more expensive, more time consuming, less transparent and way more complicated than before. An innovative and very creative way to punish small businesses, isnt’it ?