Croatia (2017 eInvoicing Country Sheet)

Legislation

From 28 February 2016 onwards, Decision 124/2015 mandates the reception and processing of electronic invoices (eInvoices) for all central contracting authorities and entities.

eInvoicing platform and management solutions

In Croatia, economic operators submit eInvoices to the central contracting authorities via the central government platform e-Račun. This platform works as the national eInvoicing exchange hub to which all economic operators have to connect to.

It is not necessary to establish bilateral contractual relations or agreements between all parties in the system; a simple registration is sufficient to exchange eInvoices with other registered users.

Based on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) infrastructure, e-Račun uses digital certificates and ensures that every user has a registered identity and that sensitive information is encrypted.

Economic operators can use different methods to connect to e-Račun:

• The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system allows economic operators to connect their accounting software or ERP[1] to e-Račun, making the eInvoicing process is fully automated;
• Economic operators can outsource the generation of eInvoices to different software providers (e.g. FINA, Moj eRačun, Redok, mStart and OptimIT - B2B, Hrvatski Telekom, Hrvatska pošta, HPD iRačun  - B2C) that provide eInvoicing management services including the creation of eInvoices;
• Economic operators can individually and independently send eInvoices to central contracting authorities by creating an individual account on the e-Račun platform.

e-Račun is operated by the Financial agency (FINA), a state owned service provider under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Crafts.

Approach for receiving and processing

Contracting authorities receive eInvoices via the central eInvoicing platform e-Račun. The processing of eInvoices depends on the contracting authorities’ technology. Generally, eInvoices are processed in a semi-automated way, where the processing of eInvoices requires some human intervention.

The Croatian government recommends the use of the OASIS UBL 2.1 standard for B2G public procurement. There are, however, other standards in place such as Cross Industry Invoice (CII). 

Additional information

In 2015, the Croatian Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Crafts participated in a CEF-funded project: the “Croatian eInvoicing Business-to-Administration Exchange Project”. It’s objective was to promote and accelerate the uptake of eInvoicing in Croatia amongst public and private entities, by improving the existing invoicing technical and operational environment. The Ministry finalised the implementation of the project in May 2017.

In addition, the same Ministry has been awarded a second project in the context of the 2016 CEF Work Programme, which has started in September 2017. The “eInvoicing for Croatian Public Authorities (eICPA)” project aims to support the implementation of the European eInvoicing standard in existing eInvoicing solutions as well as the uptake of eInvoicing solutions by public authorities in Croatia. Moreover, the project will deploy an eDelivery Access Point (AS2 + AS4) and Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) to ensure cross-border document delivery.

Ministry is also preparing big consortia for a third CEF Telecom eInvocing call to co-fund the project for local and regional administration.

Following the establishment of the CEN/TC 434, the Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Crafts established in 2014 a Croatian technical committee on eInvoicing (HZN/TO 573) under the supervision of the Croatian Standard Institute. The Committee's objective is to follow the work of CEN/TC 434, to actively participate in the writing of normative documents within the work of CEN/TC 434, to also translate the CEN/TC 434 documents into Croatian once published and to participate in their implementation in the Republic of Croatia.

[1] Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a system of software, which is designed to manage all the information and activities of a company by using shared data (Definition: Cambridge Business English Dictionary).

VALIDATED BY THE EMSFEI MEMBER

Last updated:  Dec 05, 2017 18:35