Shopee's invoice upload requirement, and how to survive it

Seller Centre's Pending Invoice Upload workflow requires you to upload your own invoice for every completed order. Shopee explicitly does not generate the invoice for you — you are the seller of record, the invoice is yours to issue, and the platform quotes penalties of up to ₱50,000 per violation for orders left without one. The deadline tracks the BIR e-invoicing mandate: 31 December 2026.

Under the Ease of Paying Taxes rules, the Invoice is the principal document for both goods and services — an Official Receipt no longer supports input VAT. Every invoice needs your registered name, TIN with branch code, business address, the transaction date, item descriptions and the total. Sell ₱1,000 or more to a VAT-registered buyer and the buyer's name, address and TIN become mandatory too. VAT-registered sellers issue for every sale regardless of amount.

Numbering matters more than sellers expect: invoice numbers must be gapless, and a gap in the sequence is exactly what a BIR examiner looks for. A spreadsheet with a typed number column cannot promise that; software allocating numbers under a database lock can.

Doing this by hand means one invoice per order, typed, numbered, saved and uploaded — every day. The workflow that survives volume looks different: export your completed orders from Seller Centre as a spreadsheet, import the whole file into your invoicing software so each order becomes a draft with its lines split by VAT class, issue them in one batch so every document takes the next gapless number, and download the PDFs for upload. A month of orders becomes an hour of checking rather than a week of typing.

Marketplaces also withhold on your remittances under RR 16-2023 — effectively 0.5% of gross — and issue BIR Form 2307 for it. Those certificates are tax you have already paid; every one you lose is a credit you cannot claim at filing time. Track them as they arrive, not in a folder you promise to sort in April.