Refunding a fiscal receipt: how a mistake at the till gets corrected

The cashier typed the wrong quantity, the customer is bringing goods back, the card went through twice. In every one of those situations the first question is: how do I cancel that receipt. You cannot delete it, and that is deliberate; it is cancelled with a new receipt, by exact rules.

An issued fiscal receipt is never deleted

A fiscal receipt has been signed with the security element, has been given a PFR number and a place in the counter sequence, and its data goes to the Tax Administration, in real time or, if the connection is down, within five days at the latest. Deleting it would mean that sequence has a hole in it, which is exactly what fiscalization exists to prevent.

That is why an issued fiscal receipt is not deleted but corrected with a new receipt.

A correction is made with a new receipt, transaction type Refund, of type Normal (Промет), or Advance when an advance receipt is being corrected. The old record is not erased: both stay in turnover and their sum is the correct amount.

What a refund must carry

A refund is not an ordinary receipt with a minus sign. It has to show what it relates to, so it carries two fields an ordinary sale usually does not have:

• The referent document number, that is the PFR number of the original receipt.
• The referent document date and time, that is the PFR time of the original.

A buyer ID is required as well. This is where people most often stumble, because a customer in a shop has no reason to show identification. The logic of the rule is that money going back has to be tied to someone, otherwise refunds become a way of quietly reducing turnover.

Amounts and payment method

Amounts on a refund are entered as positive numbers, and what says this is money going back is the transaction type; on the printed receipt the PFR shows the item value with a minus sign. The tax recap covers the returned items.

The payment method on a refund should match how the money actually went back. If the customer paid by card and the money went back to the card, the payment method is payment card. If it was paid by card and returned as cash from the till, the payment method is cash. The exception is food and drink served for consumption on the premises, and bakeries: under article 6(2) of the Rulebook, card payments there are recorded as cash anyway.

In Otkucaj, unlike a sale, a refund's payment total has to match the amount exactly: a refund has no change, because there is nothing to hand back over the top.

Partial refunds

If a customer returns one of the three things on a receipt, the refund carries only that item. The original receipt stays as it is, and the refund takes off exactly what came back.

Correcting a mistake is different: if five was typed instead of two, the technical guide (section 9.3) requires the wrong receipt to be cancelled in full, with all its items, quantities and prices, and a new correct receipt issued for two pieces.

Cancelling a whole receipt

If the whole receipt is wrong, the refund carries every item of the original, in the same quantities and at the same prices. The result in turnover is zero and the trail stays visible, which is the point.

Then, if needed, a new correct receipt of the same type as the wrong one is issued, usually Normal (Промет), transaction type Sale.

"Storno" is a word from the old system

In everyday speech people still say "storniraj racun", from the days of the old fiscal registers, used until 30 April 2022. In the electronic fiscalization system storno does not exist as an operation: there are refunds and cancellations, and both are issued as transaction type Refund.

A refund is a fiscal document in its own right, created after the sale, with its own number and its own signature.

The refund copy and the customer's signature

When money is paid back in cash on the spot, the technical guide (section 9.6) has the seller issue a copy of the refund after the refund, which the customer receiving the money signs by hand; it replaces the old correction order and stays with the cashier as proof that the money was paid back. When the money goes back to a card or by another non-cash route, no refund copy is issued.

A copy is a fiscal document that is not a fiscal receipt, and it must carry the words КОПИЈА and ОВО НИЈЕ ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН in letters at least twice the size of the other text. On its own it does not confirm that a sale was recorded.

Is there a deadline

The Law on Fiscalization sets no deadline within which a refund has to be issued, because that depends on the grounds for the return, and those come from other legislation, above all the Consumer Protection Act and your own contract with the customer.

What fiscalization requires, as we understand it, is that every return is recorded with a refund when it happens, not collected up and typed in at the end of the month.

How a refund affects reports

In the fiscal data a refund carries its own date: if the original receipt is from last month, last month's receipts stay as they are and the refund shows on the day it was issued. How this is booked, and when the VAT goes down (article 21 of the VAT Act sets conditions for that), is a matter to settle with your accountant.

That is normal and expected, but worth knowing in advance, because a daily report containing returns can look confusing to someone who does not know what they are looking at. In Otkucaj the daily turnover already shows refunds as a separate line, precisely so the difference is visible rather than only inferred from a subtraction.