What actions need to be taken to connect a cash register in the Czech Republic to the tax authorities?

This document contains an explanation of the installation of a RetailVista POS environment in the Czech Republic. The regulations there are special because every sale must be reported to the tax authorities.

This documentation is still under development and will be supplemented with the experience and information gained in the coming period.

Introduction

Every transaction of RetailVista POS that takes place on a cash register falling under Czech fiscal legislation must send its data to the Czech tax authorities. In response to this transmission, an FIK number is generated, which is printed at the bottom of the receipt.

This communication takes place during the closing of a transaction and may take a maximum of 10 seconds within RetailVista POS. In order to communicate with the tax authorities, the store itself must apply for a certificate. More information about certificates will follow in separate paragraphs.

If the tax authorities are unreachable for any reason or give errors, the transaction will be closed immediately or after a maximum of 10 seconds. The transaction will then be sent to the server, which will try to submit it again. If this submission also fails, the transaction will be saved as 'rejected'. When printing the end-of-day count, all rejected transactions from the past 30 days will be processed again, hopefully resulting in a successful submission to the tax authorities.

Certificate information

Every VAT-paying party needs such a connection number. This concerns an X509 certificate with the file extension 'p12'. It seems that the file name of the certificate will correspond to the VAT identification number of the company.

This certificate must be installed on every PC where RetailVista POS is also installed. Each POS environment requires that certificate.

Because it may be necessary to process transactions from the server, the certificates must also be stored in RetailVista. > TODO elaborate how

Production environment certificate

The tax authorities issue 'production' certificates to taxpayers. Once a valid certificate is received from the tax authorities, it must be installed.

A certificate also includes a certificate from the issuing authority (root authority). It is currently unknown whether this root certificate needs to be installed separately for production certificates. In many situations, the root certificate is already known on the Internet and separate installation is not necessary. The documentation will be updated on this aspect as more clarity is obtained.

Test (playground) environment certificate

For testing purposes, a test certificate can be used. This test environment is called a playground. Transactions sent to the playground with a test certificate are not recorded as production information, so a store does not fulfill its tax obligations. Therefore, it is important not to install test certificates at a store or on a RetailVista production server.

Attached to this QA is a zipfile 'EET_CA1_Playground_1.zip'. It contains both a root certificate (EET_CA1_Playground-ca.crt) and a test certificate (EET_CA1_Playground-CZ1212121218.p12). These certificates must be installed in sequence. The order is important: first the root certificate, then the test certificate.

Certificate installation

Installation is done by double-clicking on a certificate file and then choosing 'Install Certificate'.

Enter the password received from the Czech tax authorities, along with the certificate, in the password field.

It is very important to indicate during the installation of the certificate that it is 'exportable'. If this is not specified, the certificate will not be usable by RetailVista POS.

After the certificate (and possibly the root certificate) has been installed, it can be checked in the certificate management of Windows. To do this, start mmc.exe and select 'Add/Remove Snap-in' from the File menu, then choose 'Certificates' from the list of available snap-ins. In the next screen, select 'My user account'. The 'Certificates' snap-in will now be part of the management console.

Now locate the installed certificate under 'Personal'. The test certificate 'CZ1212121218.p12' can be found in the screen below.

By opening the certificate, the screen below should appear. This shows the purposes of the certificate. If there is a notification stating that the use of the certificate cannot be determined, it is usually because the root certificate is missing. This is clearly visible in the 'Certification Path' tab. In that case, install the root CA certificate (.cer file) and then reinstall the .p12 certificate.

Ultimately, the certificate must be displayed as valid in this application, otherwise RetailVista POS will never be able to use it.

Finally, this screen also shows the validity of the certificate. Certificates always have a limited validity. RetailVista POS also tests the validity of the certificate during startup and will start notifying that the certificate needs to be renewed within 60 days of its expiration date.

Logging

By default, limited data is always written to the FiscalInterchange files in the ProgramData\NedFox\RetailVistaPosV2\Log\ folder. Part of this limited display is the duration of the communication with the tax authorities and the obtained FIK result.

The duration and result information is also recorded in the transaction XML.

By enabling full logging in the settings of RetailVista POS, more information will appear in the log files.

Settings

The settings required for communication with the tax authorities in the Czech Republic can be defined per POS terminal in the 'custom settings'. This is a text box in the local configuration of RetailVista POS. It is not possible to do this centrally via a POS terminal group, because each POS is assigned its own ID. Below are the possible settings with an explanation.

From the information above, it can be deduced that the total string for a test environment is:

fi-taxid=CZ1212121218;fi-businesspremisesid=bpid;fi-countrycode=CZ;fi-certpwd=eet;fi-mode=test;

All the above settings can also be specified through the advanced settings in RetailVista POS itself. Any found setting value from advanced settings overrides any specified value in the POS terminal settings. The settings must be separated by a ; character in that case. For example: fi-taxid=CZ1234;fi-certpwd=123.

The settings in POS terminals will only be available in RetailVista at a later time. Currently, the settings regarding fiscal integration can only be specified through 'Advanced settings' in RetailVista POS itself.

Testing

Using the test certificate in the attachment of this QA, it is possible to test whether the communication with the test environment of the Czech tax authorities is functioning. It is not possible to access the production environment with a test certificate. With the production certificate obtained from the customer, communication can only be done with the production environment and it is not possible to access the test environment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: What does error code '4' mean in communication with the tax authorities?
Answer: Error code 4 means that the message cannot be read by the tax authorities. This is caused by incorrect installation of the certificates. Check this QA for the correct settings and installation of certificates.

Question:Is an additional license required to enable fiscal integration?
Answer: No, this functionality is a standard part of RetailVista POS.

Question: Can fiscal integration be disabled?
Answer: No, if it is determined based on the country code that fiscal integration is required, it will take place. 

Question: Is there a Czech website with more information?
Answer: Yes, these are among others:
http://www.etrzby.cz/cs/technicka-specifikace

Question: When starting RetailVista POS, a message appears stating that a certain certificate cannot be found as an installed certificate on the PC (for example, certificate CZ1212121218). What does this message mean?
Answer: Each branch receives its own certificate from the Czech tax authorities. This certificate is issued based on the Czech Tax ID of that branch. The previously mentioned setting can indicate what that ID is with /fi-taxid. With this information, RetailVista tests whether a certificate with the same name is present. This message indicates that the certificate cannot be found. The solution consists of installing the correct certificate obtained from the Czech tax authorities and correctly specifying the /fi-Tax-Id setting. If this message continues to appear, the actual name of the certificate is likely not the same as the number specified in the configuration. This can be checked by searching for the installed certificate in certificate management. It will be listed under the actual name of the certificate, which will probably be different. Note: The file name of the certificate does not mean anything at all!