e-Archive Invoice in Turkey (e-Arşiv Fatura): What It Is, Who Gets One and How It Differs from e-Invoice

An e-Archive invoice (e-Arşiv Fatura) is the electronic invoice a Turkish business issues to a buyer who is not registered for e-Invoice: a consumer or an unregistered company. It is created electronically, reported to the Turkish Revenue Administration (GİB), sent to the buyer by email or on paper, and stored electronically as the legal original.

A misleading name: e-Archive is an invoice type, not a storage service

Finance teams often read "e-Archive" as "electronic archive of invoices". It is actually an electronic invoice issuing method defined by GİB, the Turkish Revenue Administration. GİB's page about the e-Archive Invoice application defines its scope as creating the invoice electronically, delivering it on paper or electronically depending on the buyer's request, and keeping and presenting it electronically.

The confusion has practical consequences. A team may file the printout and consider the job done, but the law expects you to keep the electronic document. Internal email and document retention is a separate topic, which we cover in email archiving and data protection.

Turkey runs two parallel schemes. e-Invoice (e-Fatura) applies when both seller and buyer are registered and the document travels through GİB's system; we explain it, and how to connect it to an ERP, in our e-invoice integration guide. This article focuses on the other half: what an e-Archive invoice is, who receives it and where day-to-day operations go wrong. For shipments where goods leave before the invoice, the document added to the same ERP flow is covered in our e-waybill rollout guide.

e-Archive invoice vs e-Invoice vs paper invoice in Turkey

The last row is often missed: a printed e-Archive invoice is only a visual copy; in an audit, the electronic document is what counts.

The cost of getting e-Archive wrong

By count, e-Archive invoices now outnumber e-Invoices roughly ten to one, so a small error that repeats on every invoice becomes a pile of month-end corrections.

According to the GİB 2025 Annual Activity Report, 11,523,831,577 e-Archive invoices were issued in Turkey in 2025, by 1,937,308 taxpayers using the e-Archive application. The same year, 1,188,605,103 e-Invoices were issued.

Businesses outside the scheme are not outside electronic invoicing either. The same GİB activity report shows that 2,313,965 taxpayers not enrolled in e-Archive issued 59,552,546 invoices through GİB's free e-Archive Invoice Portal in 2025. Because the Portal is not connected to an ERP, a business that uses an ERP or accounting software has to transfer each of these invoices into its books separately.

Per the GİB 2025 Annual Activity Report, of the 1,937,308 enrolled taxpayers, 1,851,774 used private integrators, 85,401 used the GİB Portal and only 133 had connected their own systems directly to GİB. The real question is therefore not which method to use, but how well your integrator talks to your ERP.

Note that the number of e-Invoice and e-Archive users was identical at the end of 2025. That is no coincidence: GİB's e-Archive information page states that taxpayers registered for e-Invoice must also move to e-Archive. A business that joins e-Invoice therefore has to be ready to issue e-Archive invoices to its unregistered customers as well.

Who receives an e-Archive invoice? A five-question decision flow

Before an invoice is issued, the ERP, or the person issuing it, should answer these questions in order:

1. Is the seller enrolled in e-Archive? If not, depending on its situation, it uses GİB's e-Archive Portal or a paper invoice. Mandatory thresholds are set and revised by GİB communiqués, so confirm the current position on GİB's e-document pages and with your Turkish accountant.
2. Is the buyer registered for e-Invoice? If so, an e-Invoice is issued. Check this at the moment of invoicing; an outdated flag on the customer record is the most common cause of the wrong document type.
3. Is the buyer a consumer or a business? Consumer invoices use different identifiers, such as the Turkish national ID number instead of a tax number; business invoices need a complete tax office and tax number.
4. Was the sale made online? For internet sales, the e-Archive invoice is expected to be delivered electronically and to carry extra fields such as the website address, payment and shipping details; check that your e-commerce platform actually passes these fields to the invoice.
5. How does the buyer want to receive it? Email or paper? Store the preference on the customer record so nobody has to ask again for every invoice.

All of this depends on clean customer data; see data quality and duplicates.

Six steps to make e-Archive part of daily operations

1. List every invoice source. ERP, web shop, marketplaces, POS or service software: which channels produce e-Archive invoices? Turning marketplace orders into invoices is covered in marketplace integration. Freelance professional income is documented not with an invoice but with an e-SMM freelance receipt.
2. Choose the method. At very low volumes the Portal may do, provided you accept re-keying every invoice into the ERP. For most businesses, a private integrator connected to the ERP is the right route.
3. Automate the document type decision. The buyer's e-Invoice registration should be checked at invoicing time, and the ERP should decide between e-Invoice and e-Archive on its own.
4. Design delivery. It should be clear which address an emailed invoice goes to and who is alerted when it bounces.
5. Write down cancellation and returns. Who does what, and on which screen, when an e-Archive invoice is issued in error or a return invoice is needed? Agree the rules with your integrator.
6. Plan retention and access. Under the Turkish Tax Procedure Law, documents are kept for five years starting from the year after the one they relate to; the Turkish Commercial Code requires commercial books and documents to be kept for ten years. Ask up front how you will reach documents stored by the integrator if the contract ends, and align in-house rules with your data retention and disposal policy. Plan it together with the e-ledger and berat process so invoices flow cleanly into journal entries at month end.

Common mistakes

• Issuing e-Archive to a registered buyer. If the customer record is out of date, a company that should receive an e-Invoice gets an e-Archive invoice and the document needs correcting.
• Entering invoices twice. Invoices issued on the Portal are re-keyed into the ERP, costing time and creating reconciliation gaps. For the cash side, see bank reconciliation automation.
• Treating the printout as the original. A filed printout does not replace the electronic original.
• Forgetting the invoice email. If a customer says they never received it, the email may have landed in spam or quarantine; because buyers are wary of fake invoices, a fixed, recognisable sending address matters. How buyers tell genuine invoices from fraudulent ones is covered in fake invoice email scams.
• Leaving the accountant out. Agree early how invoices will reach your external accountant; see accounting firm document management.

How we handle e-Archive invoicing at Digital Bridge

We treat e-Archive as one link in the order-to-invoice-to-cash chain, not a separate software install, and we start by mapping how things work today.

• Discovery and needs analysis. Together we map which channels produce invoices, which integrator you use, and where re-keying and double entry happen. If this is part of a wider change programme, we prioritise it within digital transformation consultancy.
• Connecting the ERP and the integrator. Through API integration we connect Logo, Mikro, SAP Business One and custom ERPs to your private integrator in both directions. The document type is decided at invoicing time; failed documents raise an alert and corrected ones are resent.
• Starting with a pilot. One channel, such as web shop orders, goes live first; cancellation and return scenarios are tested in the integrator's test environment before other channels follow.
• One layer for every channel. e-Commerce, marketplace, courier and e-Invoice connections sit on the same API layer following our integrated systems approach, so a new channel does not mean a new integration from scratch.
• Closing ERP gaps. If the customer record lacks registration status, delivery preference or online-sale fields, we add them through custom ERP development or as extensions to your current ERP.

Scope, phases and fees are set out in a written proposal after the needs analysis. If you have not yet moved to an ERP, our ERP guide for SMEs is a good starting point, and which processes to automate first helps you decide where to begin.

For many Turkish businesses, e-documents are the first tangible step of digital transformation. To place that step in a wider plan, read our digital transformation roadmap, or browse sector examples in our Digital Transformation articles.

Next step: measure your own invoicing flow

Start with one month of figures: how many e-Archive invoices you issued, how many were re-keyed into the ERP, how many needed cancelling or a return invoice, and how many went out as the wrong document type. These show whether the problem lies in Portal use, customer data or the integration.

Bring those figures to us via our contact page and we will plan the link between your ERP, your integrator and your sales channels together.