Can a fiscal receipt be printed on A4: what the technical guide says and what may appear on the page

The question rarely arrives in that form. It arrives as "the customer wants an A4 invoice", "the accountant will not take a till slip", or "we only have an ordinary office printer, are we allowed to use it". The answer to all three is the same, and it sits in one place: the self-assessment checklist every ESIR fills in before approval.

What section 13 actually asks

The technical guide for the administrative and technical review of ESIR or L-PFR functionality has a section 13, "Printing", which reads: "All supported receipt print sizes", with the note "More than one answer is possible". Four are offered:

• 13.П1 paper roll up to 57 mm wide
• 13.П2 paper roll from 57 mm to 80 mm wide
• 13.П3 A4 format
• 13.П4 other solution

So A4 is not an exception you apply for, nor a concession granted case by case. It is one of the offered print sizes, equal in standing to a roll, and because more than one answer is allowed, the same ESIR may print both to a roll and to A4. The genuinely restrictive line in that list is 13.П1: the narrow roll is only an offered option, and our own product left it unticked, because the receipt column at its prescribed width does not fit legibly into a row that narrow.

The ESIR chooses the format, not the merchant

This is the distinction the question usually skips. Section 13 is not put to the merchant but to the product: the ESIR vendor answers it in the application, documents it in the manual, and is approved on that basis. What an ESIR did not declare was never reviewed.

In practice, then, if you want to know whether you may print on A4, the question is not "does the law allow it" but "does my register offer it and is that format part of its approval". Ask the vendor of your register; the product also appears in the register of approved ESIRs that the Tax Administration publishes. Printing in a format the register does not offer is not even mechanically possible: a receipt is not laid out in a word processor, it is issued and rendered by the ESIR itself.

What may appear on an A4 page, and what may not

A4 is a large sheet and a till receipt is a narrow column, so the question of what to do with the rest of the page follows immediately. The guide answers it explicitly, in section 16: "The space above and below the fiscal receipt (above the title line ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН and below the title line КРАЈ ФИСКАЛНОГ РАЧУНА) may be used to further adapt the appearance of the receipt."

That one sentence is what makes an A4 document with a seller header, a logo, an item table and a tax summary possible. Three further rules from the same section come with it, and they are strict:

• The receipt frame is untouchable. Between the line ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН and the line КРАЈ ФИСКАЛНОГ РАЧУНА goes what the PFR returned, with every element from section 16. It is not re-wrapped, not translated and not tidied up.
• The QR code belongs inside the frame. Section 16.П12 requires a square QR code "of dimensions not smaller than 40 mm x 40 mm and not larger than 50 mm x 50 mm", and the guide draws it inside the receipt, not underneath it.
• Nothing below the closing line is part of the receipt. Section 16.П13 says so literally: "Anything printed after it is not considered part of the fiscal receipt." An advertising field may go there (16.П14, mandatory for the advanced classification), but nothing that needs to be part of the receipt may.

Three forms of A4 in practice

When an ESIR ticks 13.П3, in practice that means one of three forms, and it may mean all three:

1. The receipt text on A4. The same textual rendering that would have gone to a roll, printed on an A4 sheet instead. It looks like a narrow strip of text on a large page, and it is formally faultless, because nothing was altered.

2. The receipt as a document, with the receipt text inside it. An A4 page carrying a seller header, an item table, a tax summary and payment details in the free space, while the fiscal receipt itself is shown in full on the same page, verbatim, with the QR code inside its own frame. Readable for an accountant, and the fiscal part untouched.

3. A custom-designed receipt, without the receipt text. A document that carries no textual rendering of the kind the PFR returns, but sets out every prescribed element of section 16 in order, within the page design. The basis for it is the "Mapping" chapter of the TaxCore technical guide, which provides that a point of sale which generates a custom-designed receipt instead of using the journal must use the prescribed mapping of elements from the request and the PFR response.

If you need to understand what has to appear inside that frame, line by line, we took it apart in Everything a Serbian fiscal receipt must show.

Printer, paper and type size

Section 14 of the guide covers printers and sets a single condition: every supported printer type must be able to print a QR code. No fiscal printer is required, and no thermal one either; an ordinary office laser or inkjet printer meets that condition.

What complicates matters in practice is not the printer but the type size. The textual rendering of a receipt is a column of a fixed 40 characters, so the type size has to be derived from the width actually being printed rather than guessed. On A4 there is more than enough room; according to the TaxCore technical guide a 40-character row is meant to fit a 58 mm roll as well, so it is not re-wrapped there either.

When A4 makes sense

• The buyer is a company and the receipt goes into its books. How the buyer TIN is entered is covered in A fiscal receipt issued to a company.
• Services, repairs and works, where the specification runs to more lines than a roll carries comfortably.
• Selling exclusively over the internet, where the receipt goes to the buyer electronically anyway (rulebook, Article 13(3)).
• An office that already has a printer and has no reason to buy a second one.

The reverse holds just as well: if you sell across a counter, a roll is faster, cheaper and more natural for the buyer. The format is a question of circumstance, not of legality, which is exactly why the guide allows more than one answer.

And when the receipt also goes out electronically

Section 15 asks which delivery methods an ESIR supports, and electronic form is among them (e-mail, SMS, messaging apps or some other form). For that case section 16.П12 adds an important sentence: "Where the receipt is delivered as an electronic document, the QR code is replaced by a URL in hyperlink form."

A PDF sent by e-mail is therefore a route the rules provide for, but as we understand the rulebook on receipt types (Article 13), it goes out with the buyer's consent and in addition to the printed receipt; only a seller who sells exclusively over the internet issues it instead of paper. How a buyer verifies such a receipt is described in How to check whether a fiscal receipt is genuine.

How far our reading goes, and what we did to check it

The third form above is the one most often got wrong, so it should be clear where our confidence comes from. Section 16 says: "The visual design of the receipt must be unambiguously clear, provided that it contains ALL elements of the fiscal receipt." That sentence reads as meaning a receipt on A4 need not be a copy of the receipt text, but that is a conclusion, and a conclusion is not a confirmation.

So we submitted the same form as a product change: version 1.3.6, with the receipt as a designed document on A4 and A5, application 1667. It was approved on 8 September 2026. The form therefore passed technical review.

How Otkucaj does it

Under section 13 we declared the 57 to 80 mm roll, the A4 format and the other solution (the receipt text as a text file and a PDF from the browser print dialog); we did not declare the narrowest roll. On A4 all three forms exist: the receipt text printed on a sheet, the receipt as a document with the fiscal slip verbatim inside the page (version 1.3.5, application 1651), and the receipt as a designed document on A4 and A5 (version 1.3.6, application 1667, approved 8 September 2026). The QR code was measured on each of those printouts and in every case stays within the prescribed square and inside the receipt frame.

Otkucaj is an ESIR approved by the Serbian Tax Administration, record number 1667, classification 3. A new account starts in the test environment, where receipts are not fiscal; production requires your own security element and PAC.

The short version

• A4 is a permitted print format for a fiscal receipt; in the guide it is answer 13.П3.
• Supporting several formats at once is allowed, so one register may print both a roll and A4.
• The format has to be declared and approved with the ESIR, so ask the vendor of your register.
• The space above and below the receipt is free for a header, a table and a logo; the receipt frame itself is not touched.
• The QR code is a square of 40 to 50 mm and sits inside the frame, never below the closing line.
• An ordinary office printer is fine; the only condition is that it can print a QR code.
• When the receipt is delivered electronically, the QR code is replaced by the verification address as a hyperlink.