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Chile is one of the earliest countries to make electronic invoicing universal, and it did so through a clearance model. The Documento Tributario Electronico, the DTE, must be validated by the tax authority, the Servicio de Impuestos Internos, before the document is legally valid. Paper invoices carry no legal validity for businesses in scope. Issuers must first be certified as authorised electronic issuers, and their documents are transmitted to and validated by the SII.
The legal basis is Ley 20.727. The mandate came in gradually from November 2014, staged by a company's annual revenue and by whether it sat in an urban or rural area, so that larger firms moved first and the smallest, most remote businesses last. The transition completed on 1 February 2018, when all companies in the country were required to invoice electronically and the last tranche, rural micro-enterprises below a defined threshold, was brought in. From that date, paper lost all legal validity.
Chile covers both business-to-business and business-to-consumer documents, including credit and debit notes and purchase invoices. Alongside Brazil, it shows how long a Latin American clearance regime has been operating at national scale, and it is a useful comparison for European authorities now building their own clearance and reporting systems a decade later.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Mandate | Documento Tributario Electronico (DTE), Ley 20.727 |
| Model | Clearance (SII validation before validity) |
| Status | Live |
| Scope | B2B and B2C |
| Rollout begins | November 2014 (staged by revenue and location) |
| Full mandate | 1 February 2018 (all companies; paper loses validity) |
| Last verified | 16 July 2026 |
Servicio de Impuestos Internos, February 2018 announcement: sii.cl. Programme landing page: sii.cl/destacados.