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Colombia · Latin America
Article 616-1 of the Estatuto Tributario puts an obligation on the buyer. Where a purchase is on credit or a payment term is granted, you must confirm receipt of the invoice and receipt of the goods — two separate electronic messages back to your supplier — and until you do, that invoice is not support for your deduction or your input VAT. Not the supplier's: yours. We already record the delivery. What we cannot do is tell anybody we recorded it, and this page sets out the difference precisely.
Estatuto Tributario article 616-1 · Resolución DIAN 227 de 2025
Read this against a Mexican clearance diagram and the shape is inverted. There, the sequence ends when the customer receives the document. Here that is the halfway point — the state has finished with the invoice before it reaches you, and the two steps that decide whether you can deduct anything happen inside your business, on your system.
Your supplier
Builds the electronic sales invoice and sends it for validation before issuing it. The statute is flat about this: an electronic sales invoice is only understood to have been issued once it has been validated and delivered to the buyer.
Not our step, and not our problem in Colombia. Where we are the seller, it is — and we do not do it.
DIAN
Validates against the published rules and returns the result. If validation cannot happen for technological reasons attributable to DIAN, the supplier may issue without it and must transmit within 48 hours of the problem being resolved.
Nothing in our product talks to DIAN. Note which way that 48-hour clause runs: it forgives the authority's outage, not yours.
You, the buyer
On credit terms, send two electronic messages back to the supplier: one confirming you received the invoice, one confirming you received the goods or services. Only then is the invoice support for your costs, your deductions and your input VAT.
We record the second event and can send neither message. The delivery is in the system as a check-in against the order. It has nowhere to go.
The third row is the page. A business using us in Colombia would be receiving goods correctly, recording them correctly, matching them against the order correctly — and still holding a stack of supplier invoices that support no deduction, because a message nobody sent was the thing that would have made them count. Nothing about that looks wrong on a screen. It shows up as tax.
Our own limitation, stated duty by duty
The checkable part, and it reads better than you would expect from a product that sends nothing. Most of what the rule needs is information we already capture at the right moment — the middle column is our schema, measured this month rather than remembered. The three empty rows are where the argument is, and one of them is empty in an unusually specific way.
Know that a purchase is on credit or has a payment term, because that is what triggers the obligation at all
Payment status and a balance outstanding are held against the order, so a purchase that has not been settled is distinguishable from one that has.
PartlyRecord that the goods or services were received
Held. Receiving is recorded against the order as a check-in with an item, a quantity, a warehouse and a batch. This is the event the rule is about.
HeldRecord that the supplier's invoice was received
The supplier's invoice is held as a link to a file on the order. That it arrived is inferable from the file existing; there is no receipt event and no date of one.
PartlyRead the invoice's own identifiers, so the acknowledgement refers to a specific document
Nothing parses it. Our own reconciliation service reports the billing comparison as not captured rather than pretending to a match it cannot make.
NothingSend the confirmation of receipt of the invoice to the supplier
No. There is no outbound message of any kind to a supplier.
NothingSend the confirmation of receipt of the goods to the supplier
No — and this is the one worth pausing on. We hold an acknowledgement timestamp on a purchase order already. It records the supplier acknowledging our order.
NothingHold the input VAT the acknowledgement unlocks, in a form a return can be computed from
Partly, and the distinction matters. A purchase order line carries a quantity, a price and a total, and no tax at all. An expense record does carry a tax amount — but not the rate that produced it, so the figure can be totalled and not recomputed or checked.
PartlyQuantity, and the unit it is counted in
Quantity is held on every line. There is no unit of measure anywhere in our schema — the same absence our Mexico page reports, found here from the buying side.
PartlyWe went looking for whether anything in our purchasing records could carry an acknowledgement, expecting to find nothing. We found one — and it runs the other way. A purchase order holds a timestamp for the supplier acknowledging us: we sent an order, they confirmed it, we recorded when. That is a perfectly sensible thing to track and it is the exact mirror image of what Colombian law requires, which is us confirming to them, twice, about two different things.
It is worth naming because of what it says about the size of the work rather than the size of the gap. The concept is present, the counterparty relationship is present, the receiving event is present and dated. What is absent is the direction, the second message, and any means of transmission. That is a build with a clear shape — which is a much better answer than a category we had never modelled, and it is why this page is longer than a refusal.
Article 616-1 puts a second trap in the buyer's path, and it is one people meet in an ordinary week rather than in an audit. A P.O.S. till receipt gives the buyer no input VAT and no deduction at all — the paragraph says so directly. It also may not be issued above 5 UVT per document, and where a buyer is entitled to claim, they can require a proper sales invoice instead. That 5 is not an amount of money: the UVT is a statutory unit re-indexed to inflation every year and republished by DIAN before each 1 January, so the peso ceiling moves annually while the statute never changes.
Our point-of-sale produces a sale with a customer, a tax amount and a receipt. It has no concept of a document type that forfeits the buyer's credit, no ceiling above which it must refuse to be one, and nothing that reads a threshold expressed in an index unit rather than in currency. Our thresholds are money. A Colombian one is a multiplier on a number that changes every December.
What this costs
None of these show up as an error. A purchase that was ordered, approved, received and reconciled correctly looks finished on every screen in the product, and the thing that was missing is a message that nobody was ever prompted to send.
This is the failure mode that makes the page worth reading. Every document is correct, every delivery is recorded, the reconciliation matches — and the deduction is not available, because a message was never sent. Nothing on any screen is red. The first sign is the tax position at the end of a period being worse than the ledger implied.
The second acknowledgement is about goods arriving, which means the compliance event happens at a loading bay rather than in a finance office. Ask any vendor where in their product a receiving clerk's action turns into an outbound message, and watch whether the answer is a screen or a description.
Colombian suppliers send a structured electronic document. A system that files it as an attachment has technically received it and can do nothing with it — no line comparison, no tax capture, no reference to acknowledge against. Ask to see what happens to a supplier invoice after it arrives, not that it can be stored.
The till-receipt ceiling is expressed in a unit the authority re-values every year. A system that stores it as pesos is correct in January and wrong by the following one, and nothing about it will announce the change. Ask how the vendor handles a limit that is defined as a multiple rather than an amount.
Operations in Colombia
The section above is a real boundary and it earned the top of the page. It is also, in hours, a rounding error. What an operator here actually spends the year on is purchasing that has to be approved before it commits anybody, goods received against what was ordered rather than against what arrived, import charges that land weeks after the container, and stock spread across cities separated by mountain ranges. All four are shipped, and none of them waits on a message to DIAN.
Procurement
Approvals that refuse, rather than notify
Purchase approval routing where the decision, the person and the time are recorded against the document, and where an unapproved order does not proceed. The distinction that matters when you are evaluating: some systems send an approval notification and let the order continue regardless. An approval that cannot block is a log entry, not a control.
Procurement
Receiving compared against what was ordered
Goods are received against the order line rather than into a general stock figure, so a short delivery, an over-delivery and a price that moved between order and arrival are all differences somebody can see. Tolerances are yours to set, and what falls outside them is an exception with a name on it.
Procurement
Landed cost allocated across the goods it belongs to
Freight, duty, handling and the charges that arrive after the shipment are entered against the purchase order and spread across the batches received from it, by value or by quantity. Where an import charge is not reclaimable, that is the only route by which it reaches the cost of the goods rather than a general expense account — and margins that never see it are overstated for as long as the stock is held.
Inventory
Stock by location, with transfers confirmed at both ends
Every warehouse, store and holding location keeps its own position, and a transfer is a movement with a state rather than a subtraction here and an addition there. Goods between Bogotá and the coast are visible while they are between them, and a receipt that does not match what was sent is a discrepancy rather than a number that quietly settles.
Scope in Colombia
The two columns are closer in length than on most pages in this corpus, and that is the accurate picture rather than a flattering one: the operational half of a Colombian purchase is genuinely well served here, and the compliance half of it is genuinely absent. Read the first two items on the right before anything on the left.
Running in the product today
Not built — and the first two are the reason to read this page
Not ours, by choice
Scope, not a ceiling — and we can point at the evidence rather than asking you to take it on faith. This product already files documents to a national tax authority: Kenya's system, covering both point-of-sale takings and customer invoices, built against a published specification with the authority's own receipt number, signature and timestamp written back onto our record, and maintained since. That is the shape of what Colombia needs, pointed the other way — outbound from purchasing rather than from sales, and carrying an acknowledgement rather than a sale. The work in front of it is ordinary and we would quote it as such: read the supplier's electronic invoice into lines, put tax on a purchase line, turn a receiving event into a message, and hold a threshold that is a multiple rather than an amount. Tell us which of those is standing between you and a decision, and we will tell you what it costs.
How this starts
Not whether the vendor "supports DIAN" — ask to watch a delivery be received, and then ask what leaves the system as a result. If the answer is a portal somebody logs into separately, that portal is your compliance system and the product you are being shown is a record kept alongside it.
Ask what the product knows about it: the lines, the tax, the document reference. If it can show you a file and not a document, then every downstream thing — the acknowledgement, the input credit, the three-way comparison — is being done by a person somewhere with the file open.
The till-receipt ceiling is a multiple of an index the authority resets annually. Ask where that unit lives, what updates it, and what happens in January if nobody does. It is a small question that reveals whether a vendor has met this market or only read about it.
We are a defensible choice in Colombia as the operational layer — purchasing, approvals, receiving, landed cost, stock, assets, the ledger — beside something that handles the electronic document exchange. We are a bad choice as the thing that discharges your acknowledgement obligation. That is a straightforward conversation in week one and an expensive one in month six.
Read before you shortlist
A field that saves without error is not evidence of a feature. We have two date columns on our own tax rate table that accept writes and change nothing, and the pattern is common enough to test any vendor with.
Jamaica charges 15%, 25% and 10% under a single tax, and the 10% ends on 1 April 2027. Configuration screens ask which country you are in, which for a great many businesses is the wrong question entirely.
Bangladesh puts suppliers on one of two registers. A registered supplier charges VAT you reclaim; an enlisted one charges a turnover tax you cannot. Two quotes at the same figure are therefore not the same cost, the cheaper-looking one is usually the smaller business, and no purchasing comparison we have seen can tell them apart.
What Colombian buyers ask us
No. There is no outbound message to a supplier anywhere in the product — not for the invoice, not for the goods. Under article 616-1 of the Estatuto Tributario, a purchase on credit terms becomes support for your costs, deductions and input VAT once you have confirmed both by electronic message, and we confirm neither. What we do have is the harder half already in place: the delivery itself is recorded against the order, with the item, the quantity and the moment. If you need the acknowledgements discharged today, you need something that transmits them, and we would say so in the first meeting rather than the fourth. It is not a permanent limit — we have built exactly this shape of integration against a published specification before, for Kenya's tax authority, and it is maintained. What it is not, in any version, is a setting somebody can switch on for you.
Nineteen per cent. Article 468 of the Estatuto Tributario sets the general rate, and it has read that way since article 184 of Ley 1819 de 2016 took effect on 1 January 2017. That is the figure we would ship as your default. There are reduced schedules and a zero-rated list, both of them long and both of them moved by successive reform acts, and we deliberately do not reproduce them here — a list of goods on a vendor page is exactly the kind of thing that is right when it is written and quietly wrong a year later. Your own rate is stored per invoice line, so a document can be raised at whatever the schedule says regardless of the default.
Because DIAN renumbered everything. On 23 September 2025 it issued a single consolidated resolution covering tax, customs and exchange matters, and compiled its existing resolutions into it — so the acknowledgement rule that was article 34 of one resolution and then article 28 of another is now article 1.5.4.9.1. The older numbers still appear in most guidance, vendor material and consultancy writing, and they are not wrong so much as superseded. We cite the current instrument and give the old number alongside it, which is what DIAN does in its own compilation. It is worth knowing before you compare two sources and conclude that one of them is out of date.
Because the law does not ask you to know, it asks you to tell. The statute wants an electronic message sent to the issuer confirming that you received the invoice and that you received the goods, in the form the technical annex specifies. Recording a receipt internally satisfies the evidential half and none of the procedural one. We think it is worth being precise about the difference, because it changes what the work is: this is not a category of information we have never modelled, it is a transmission we have never built, and those cost very different amounts. What is genuinely missing alongside it is the ability to read the supplier's document in the first place, so that the acknowledgement refers to something specific.
That is the arrangement we would actually recommend, and it is why this page exists rather than a polite refusal. The provider owns the document exchange with DIAN in both directions; we own what happens around it — purchasing and approvals, receiving against the order, landed cost reaching the cost of goods, stock across locations, the asset register and the ledger. The join is the supplier master and the purchase order, and the thing worth negotiating at the seam is that the document reference and the acknowledgement status come back and get written onto our purchase record. That single discipline turns "which of our supplier invoices are not yet acknowledged" into a report you can run on a Tuesday rather than a reconstruction you attempt at the end of a period.
No. We produce no Colombian return in any format the authority accepts, and we transmit nothing. Reporting from the ledger is ours; the filing is yours or your accountant's. A return is buildable against a published specification and it is commissionable, but we would put it behind the purchasing work above rather than in front of it — a return assembled from purchases whose input VAT was never captured per line would be a tidy summary of an incomplete thing. Separately and practically, filing here is conducted in Spanish and our interface is English. Worth naming once, because it matters to a finance team even though it is not a compliance question.
The geography is the part of this market our product is least often asked about and fits best, so here it is specifically rather than as a claim about capability. Every region, depot and van is its own stock position rather than a share of a national figure — which matters because a national number is the sum of positions that cannot substitute for one another, and a system that only holds the total will cheerfully tell you that you have stock you cannot reach. Transfers between them are confirmed on arrival, so goods in motion are an owned position rather than a gap both ends assume the other is carrying, and a shortage belongs to the leg it happened on. The costs of moving them — inland haulage, handling at each transfer — attach to the consignment as their invoices arrive, so the real cost of serving a distant region is visible rather than averaged into a national figure. Two honest limits. **Four field operations work with no signal** — stock issues and returns, transfers, check-in and check-out, and asset movements — and counting, receiving a purchase order and dispatch each need a connection, so a count at a depot without coverage is a connected activity worth planning for. And we do not plan routes: we record what moved and where it went, not the optimal sequence for getting it there.
Show us a real credit-term purchase — the electronic invoice as your supplier sent it, and what your warehouse recorded when the goods arrived — and we will mark up which parts our system holds today, which are a configuration away, and which are a build. It is a twenty-minute conversation and it will tell you whether we belong on your list at all.