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Introduction

Sending an invoice through SDI is not the end of its legal life. Italian businesses must also preserve their electronic invoices long-term through a certified process known as conservazione a norma (also called conservazione sostitutiva). Keeping a copy of the XML on your own systems does not satisfy it: preservation has to follow the rules set by the Italian authorities, which in practice means an accredited provider. Invopop handles this through A-Cube, whose preservation service performs the certified archiving and issues a signed receipt for every preserved document. What gets preserved is the exact FatturaPA file exchanged with SDI, so the archived document matches what the tax authority saw. Archiving covers both directions. The rules apply to the invoices you issue and the invoices you receive, and both are preserved the same way — only the metadata differs, recording each document as issued or received.

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Setup

Archiving takes two things: the company has to be enabled for preservation, and each document has to be archived.
1

Enable the company for preservation

Before any of its invoices can be preserved, a company must be registered with the preservation service. The Register party for e-archiving step does this, and the registration workflow from the receiving invoices guide already includes it — one registration covers both directions.

Italy register party workflow

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The step reads the company’s Italian tax ID from the party, so the party must carry one. Re-running it on an already-enabled company completes without doing anything.
2

Archive the documents

Add the Archive document step to your invoice workflows, after the step that exchanges the document with SDI — after Send invoice to SDI when issuing, after Import invoice from SDI when receiving. It preserves the FatturaPA file that step put on the entry, so it has nothing to work with if it runs first.You can equally run it on its own, as a separate workflow over invoices that are already exchanged:

Italy archive document workflow

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How the archive step works

The step needs no configuration. It works out whether the document is issued or received from the file it finds on the entry — an invoice that arrived from SDI is preserved as received, anything else as issued — and records the right party as the document’s owner either way. When it runs, it:
  1. Uploads the exact FatturaPA bytes exchanged with SDI.
  2. Sends the preservation metadata built from the GOBL invoice.
  3. Records the preservation service’s identifier for the document as an indexed archive-uuid field on the entry, so it can be traced later.
  4. Waits for the service to confirm the document is preserved and its receipt is ready.
  5. Attaches the receipt to the entry in both formats the service provides.
Preservation is asynchronous, so the step stays Queued while it waits, then completes with OK. The document itself is usually preserved within seconds, though the receipt can take a few minutes to become available. It is safe to retry: re-running it on an already-archived invoice completes without uploading again or duplicating attachments. The step returns:
  • OK when the invoice was preserved and its receipt stored
  • KO when there is no FatturaPA file on the entry — the invoice was never exchanged with SDI, or the step ran before the send or import step

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What ends up on the entry

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Troubleshooting

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FAQ

Add the Archive document step to your workflows, after the step that exchanges the document with SDI. It uploads the exact FatturaPA file, waits for the preservation service to confirm the document is preserved, and attaches the signed receipt to the entry. See the archiving guide for the full setup.
Yes. Italian preservation rules cover both the invoices you issue and the ones you receive, and both are preserved the same way — add the Archive document step after the import step in your receiving workflow.
Nothing — unregistering only stops receiving. Invoices already preserved under conservazione a norma stay preserved, as the law requires.
More available in our Italy FAQ section

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