Overview of Fiscal Document Capture

The Brazil business sector is regulated by a tax regime that requires issuance of fiscal documents (Nota Fiscal in Portuguese) when goods and services are sold and when goods are shipped from one physical address to another.

The Nota Fiscal is generally a supplier generated trade document that accompanies the goods to its destination within the Brazilian borders.

A fiscal document is required to document trade between suppliers and customers and it also serves as a bill of lading that details the quantity of items being transported from the supplier to its customers or from customers to suppliers. Also, the fiscal document serves as a proxy invoice from the supplier with information on the material costs, supplier charges, and taxes that are payable by the customer.

The Brazilian fiscal authorities mandate that domestic suppliers and customers retain the fiscal documents for government tax purposes. Also, there is a related requirement that companies retain the fiscal document to allow the fiscal authorities to review applied taxes on the sale and purchase of goods and services.

The following attributes are common across fiscal document formats.

• General attributes

• Fiscal attributes

• Source document information

• Charges

• Taxes

• Referenced fiscal documents

• Legal processes

• Holds and tolerances

General Attributes

The general attributes in fiscal documents aren't used for fiscal purposes. They provide information that provides context to other information in fiscal documents. The general attributes can include ship from address, ship-to address, item details, item UOMs, document creation date, and so on.

Fiscal Attributes

The fiscal attributes in a fiscal document are used to determine the types of taxes that apply on purchase of goods or services from a supplier.

For a fiscal document type (CFOP code) business purpose, (CFOP is a code defined by the Brazilian authorities to describe business types), the following are used for determining taxes.

• Supplier city

• Buyer city

• Fiscal code of service line

Source Document Information

A source document can be a purchase order or a transfer order and information from these documents are required to identify the items provided by the supplier to the buying organization including the item numbers, quantity, unit price, and extended amounts for each item.

Note: For standard, import material, and internal material transfer flows, you can have lines in a fiscal document without referring to a source document.

Charges

The charges are expense amounts like insurance, freight, and discounts. Charges are part of the fiscal document and represent additional expenses that are billed to the customer. Charges are shown in the fiscal document and their values are part of the fiscal document's total amount.

Taxes

A fiscal document contains tax information relating to the sale and purchase of goods and services. During tax validation, applicable tax is calculated and assigned to items. The calculated total tax amount is compared with the tax amount listed in the fiscal document. If there are differences between the fiscal document and the calculated tax amounts, then the differences are resolved or documented before approving the fiscal document.

Some of the taxes that are included in a fiscal document are as listed in the following table:

Tax	Description
ISS	Municipal service tax
IRRF	Federal corporate income tax
INSS	Federal social security tax
PIS	Federal social contribution tax
COFINS	Federal social contribution tax
CSLL	Federal social contribution on net income
PIS/COFINS/CSLL	Combined federal social contribution tax
ICMS	State tax
IPI	Industrialized tax