What a Serbian fiscal receipt must contain, field by field

A fiscal receipt is a short document in which every line is there for a reason. Article 5 of the Law on Fiscalization lists what it must contain, and the Tax Administration technical guide sets out how that looks on paper. We are going to walk an illustrative sample journal line by line.

One thing first: under Serbian rules the receipt is in Serbian, in Cyrillic or Latin script, whatever language the register's interface is in; the journal the PFR returns is in Cyrillic. The illustrative sample below is in the original Serbian and the explanation of each line is in English.

============ ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН ============
             ПИБ: 123456789
          Откуцај · демо радња
            Продајно место 1
                Београд
Касир:                           Касир 1
ЕСИР број:                    1667/1.3.6
-------------ПРОМЕТ ПРОДАЈА-------------
Артикли
========================================
Назив   Цена         Кол.         Укупно
Кафа еспресо (Ђ)
        180,00          2         360,00
Кроасан са путером (Ђ)
        220,00          1         220,00
Негазирана вода 0,33 (Е)
        120,00          1         120,00
----------------------------------------
Укупан износ:                     700,00
Готовина:                         700,00
========================================
Ознака       Име      Стопа        Порез
Ђ          О-ПДВ    20,00%         96,67
Е          П-ПДВ    10,00%         10,91
----------------------------------------
Укупан износ пореза:              107,58
========================================
ПФР време:          19.08.2026. 12:34:56
ПФР број рачуна:    DM9EWQ0Z-DM9EWQ0Z-97
Бројач рачуна:                   42/97ПП
========================================
                [QR код]
======== КРАЈ ФИСКАЛНОГ РАЧУНА =========

The header: who is issuing the receipt

The first line, ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН (fiscal receipt), is itself a piece of information: it says this document has fiscal validity. If it says something else, and particularly if the receipt carries the words ОВО НИЈЕ ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН (this is not a fiscal receipt) anywhere on it, the document in your hand is not proof that a sale was recorded.

Below it comes the taxpayer's identification:

• The TIN (ПИБ), nine digits.
• The business name the taxpayer is registered under.
• The sales point name and address, because fiscalization is tracked per sales point, not per company.

Those three have to match what was registered with the Tax Administration for that sales point. They are put on the receipt by the fiscal receipt processor itself, from the data tied to the security element, not by the register.

Cashier and ESIR number

Касир (cashier) identifies the person who issued the receipt. It does not have to be a full name, but it does have to tell one operator from another.

The ESIR number is the registration number of the approved ESIR, the one the Tax Administration assigns by decision and enters in the public register, followed by the software version. The example above reads 1667/1.3.6: before the slash is the registration number the Tax Administration assigns, after it the software version.

Receipt type and transaction type

The line ПРОМЕТ ПРОДАЈА carries two pieces of information at once.

The first is the receipt type. The rulebook knows two types of fiscal receipt, sale (промет) and advance; copy, proforma and training are fiscal documents that do not count as fiscal receipts. The register issues all of them, so the system has five types:

The second is the transaction type, and there are two: sale and refund.

They combine, which is why "sale refund" and "advance refund" both exist. The second of those is usually not money handed back to the customer: it is how an advance is closed before the final receipt is issued. The same combination, however, also records an advance refunded to a customer who withdraws, and the cancellation of an advance receipt issued in error.

Proforma, copy and training documents must carry the words ОВО НИЈЕ ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН together with the type (КОПИЈА, ОБУКА, ПРЕДРАЧУН), written so that it cannot be changed or erased and in a font at least twice the size of the other text. The journal the PFR returns puts those words at the start and at the end of the document. The size is not decoration but a requirement of the rulebook, so such a document cannot be mistaken for a real receipt at a glance.

Line items

Every item carries a name, a unit of measure, a unit price, a quantity and a total. The unit of measure follows the name after a slash (for example Брашно /кг) and is left out only for goods sold by the piece and for a single service, as in the example. The tax label follows the name in brackets, (Ђ) and (Е) in the example.

Quantity may be decimal, which matters for anything sold by measure: 0.375 kilograms, 1.5 metres, 2.25 hours of work.

The price on a receipt always includes tax. Tax is not added to the displayed price, it is extracted from it, which is what the tax recap shows.

Total and payment

After the items comes the total, then the payment lines. There are seven payment methods: cash, payment card, cheque, bank transfer, voucher, instant payment and other cashless payment. The exception is catering (food and drink served for consumption on the spot) and bakeries: there, under Article 6(2) of the rulebook, card, cheque and instant payments are recorded as cash.

One receipt may carry several methods at once. A shop customer paying part in cash and part by card gets one receipt with two payment lines, not two receipts. In a cafe or restaurant, under the same exception, both payments would be recorded as cash.

If the customer hands over more than the total, a Повраћај (change) line appears below with the amount; the law counts both the amount paid and the change among the mandatory data of a receipt (Article 5(2)(11)).

The tax recap

The table near the bottom summarises tax by label. For every label that appeared on the receipt it gives the label's name, its rate, and the amount of tax contained in what was sold.

Labels and rates are not set by the register. The fiscal receipt processor holds them and the ESIR takes them from it. If your software offers to let you type a rate in by hand while a real processor is connected, something is wrong.

Tax is calculated as a contained amount. At a 20 percent rate on turnover of 580.00 dinars, the tax is 580.00 multiplied by 20 and divided by 120, so 96.67, not 116.00.

The PFR data: the part that cannot be forged

The three lines near the bottom are the heart of the receipt, and the fiscal receipt processor produces all of them.

• ПФР време (PFR time) is the moment the processor signed the receipt. It differs from the time the sale was rung up on the register, and the first one is what counts.
• ПФР број рачуна (PFR receipt number) is the receipt's unique identifier in the Tax Administration system. It is made of the identifier of the security element that requested the signature, the identifier of the security element that signed it (the same with an L-PFR, different with a V-PFR) and a sequence number.
• Бројач рачуна (receipt counter) in the form 42/97ПП says this is the 42nd receipt of its kind, out of 97 receipts issued with that combination of security elements in total. The two letters at the end are a label assigned by the processor and say which combination of receipt type and transaction type this is: ПП in the example is Промет Продаја, a sale. Every combination has its own sequence, so advances are counted separately from ordinary receipts, and copies separately from both.

The counter is what makes a skipped receipt visible. It increases without gaps, so a missing receipt shows up immediately.

The QR code and the verification address

A QR code leading to the Tax Administration portal is printed inside the receipt frame, below the PFR metadata and above the closing line. The prescribed size of the printed code is between 40 and 50 millimetres (rulebook on receipt types, Article 10(2)).

When a receipt is delivered electronically, the same address is given as a hyperlink instead of a code. The idea is the same: the recipient must be able to verify it in one move. What that verification looks like is covered in the article on checking a fiscal receipt.

Fields that appear only sometimes

• Buyer ID, mandatory when the buyer is a legal entity or a sole trader (the law then requires their TIN, Article 5(2)(5)) and on a refund receipt, and otherwise when the customer asks to be identified. It is entered as a document type code from the code list, a colon and a number, for example a TIN, a personal number, an ID card or a passport.
• Buyer optional field, used together with the buyer ID and only when needed: a purpose code from the technical guide's code list and a document number, for example the number of a ППО-ПДВ confirmation or of a corporate card. It is not a free-text field.
• Referent document number and referent document date and time, mandatory on a refund and when closing an advance, because they tie the new receipt to the one it corrects.
• Advertising field, below the line КРАЈ ФИСКАЛНОГ РАЧУНА. It is not part of the fiscal receipt, and under the rulebook (Article 12) such text must be in a different and smaller font than the rest. Sometimes it is mandatory: on the final receipt after an advance the number and date of the last advance receipt go there, and on a receipt for a supply without consideration a note saying so (technical guide, sections 9.1 and 9.7).

How to tell at a glance that a receipt is not fiscal

Three things are enough to look at:

1. There is no QR code and no verification address.
2. There is no PFR receipt number and no counter.
3. It says ОВО НИЈЕ ФИСКАЛНИ РАЧУН somewhere.

Any one of the three is enough on its own. The document may still be legitimate, a proforma or a copy for instance, but it does not serve as proof that a sale was recorded.