Receipts and Invoices: What Chinese Customers Ask For

A guest asks whether you can issue a 发票. The operator does not know what that is, searches it, finds the word "invoice", says yes, and sends a PDF. Two weeks later the guest is back saying it was rejected, and neither party understands what went wrong.

A fapiao is not an invoice in the sense you mean. It is a document issued through China's tax system, and issuing one requires being registered with the Chinese tax authorities — which, if you are an overseas business with no Chinese entity, you are not. You cannot produce one, and no amount of formatting makes a PDF into one.

That is the whole of the bad news, and it matters less than it sounds. What the guest needs is almost never the fapiao itself; it is whatever the fapiao would have let them do.

The short version: you cannot issue a fapiao and should never imply otherwise. Ask what the document is for, because reimbursement, a visa application, an insurance claim and a personal record each need something different. For reimbursement — the common case — what usually works is an itemized invoice carrying the exact registered name of their employer, which you should ask them to send you as text rather than type from memory. Their finance department's rules decide the rest, and you cannot promise what those rules are.

Ask what it is for

One question saves the whole exchange: what do you need it for? Four common answers, four different documents.

Reimbursement from their employer. They paid for a business trip and want the money back. This is the most involved case and the rest of this post is mostly about it.

A visa application. They need proof the trip is booked, before they travel and often before they have paid in full. What helps is a booking confirmation with dates, names as they appear in the passport, and your company details. Handle this one quickly — it usually arrives with a deadline attached.

An insurance claim. Something went wrong, or they bought cover. They need an itemized document showing what was paid, for what, and when.

A personal record. They just want a receipt. Send one and stop.

What to put on a document for reimbursement

Nothing exotic — an ordinary commercial invoice, complete rather than clever:

• Your full legal entity name, as registered, with address and company or tax registration number.
• The customer's company name if the expense is being reimbursed — see below, because this is the field that fails.
• A date, and an invoice number.
• Itemized lines: what was purchased, dates of service, quantity, unit price.
• The total, with the currency stated explicitly.
• How it was paid, and confirmation that it was paid.

Send it as a PDF. If you have a company stamp, use it — a stamped document reads as more official to a Chinese finance department than an unstamped one, and it costs you nothing.

The field that gets it rejected

The 抬头 — the name the invoice is made out to — has to be the employer's registered Chinese company name, exactly. Not a translation, not the brand everybody uses, not close enough.

A Chinese company name is a precise string, and finance departments reject documents over a single wrong character. Two habits prevent almost all of this:

Ask them to send the name as text, in a message you can copy from. Never type it yourself from something they said, and never guess at a translation.

Ask before the trip, not after. Reissuing a document after the fact is possible but slow, and the guest often needs it in the first week back.

They may also ask for their company's 税号 — a taxpayer identification number. Put it on the document as given. It is theirs, not yours, and you are only transcribing it.

What you cannot promise

Whether any particular Chinese employer accepts a foreign invoice is that employer's policy, not a rule you can look up. Many do, for expenses incurred abroad, precisely because a fapiao cannot exist for them. Some want additional paperwork. A few will not budge.

So the sentence to use is that you will provide a complete itemized invoice with their company name on it, and that you cannot guarantee what their finance department will accept — that part is worth their asking before the trip rather than after.

This is more useful than a confident answer, because a confident answer that turns out to be wrong lands on you.

Currency, and the thing not to do

Your invoice is in your currency, at the amount that was actually paid. Their side converts it. Do not issue an RMB-denominated document to be helpful — it invites questions you cannot answer about which rate was used and why.

The related point is the one nobody writes down. You will occasionally be asked to make the invoice out for more than was paid, or to describe the purchase as something else. The answer is no, and it is worth being ready with a version of it that is friendly and final, because the request is usually made casually and refusing it in the moment is easier if you have said the sentence before.

Where this fits with everything else

The request will reach you in chat, for the reasons in why your Chinese customers never answer email. That post also names the exception, and this is it: formal paperwork — a letter supporting a visa application, an invoice for corporate reimbursement — is the one job email still does in China. So reply in the conversation you are already having, and send the file by email too if their finance department wants it arriving from your company domain.

Whatever you issue should be traceable back to a payment, which is the record-keeping habit described in settlement and reconciliation — a document you cannot tie to a transaction is a problem for your accountant even when the customer is satisfied.

And none of this is tax advice. What your own obligations are when invoicing a Chinese business, and how the income is treated, is a question for your accountant rather than for a blog.

A five-minute preparation

Before the season, not during it: build one template with your entity details already in it, and leave three fields blank — the customer's company name, the date, and the lines. Then add one question to your booking form asking whether an invoice is needed and, if so, what name it should be made out to.

That question, asked at booking, removes nearly all of the version of this problem that happens under time pressure with somebody already home and annoyed.

Where CN1X fits

We are not your accountant and we do not issue anything on your behalf. What we do is make sure the question gets asked in Chinese at the point where the answer is cheap — a field on the booking form rather than a message three weeks later — and that the reply your guest receives says what you can provide and what you cannot.

We will not write copy claiming you can issue a fapiao, and if you have a page that currently implies it, that is worth fixing before your next Chinese booking. Show us your booking flow and we will point at the place this question belongs.