How do you actually translate 发票?

Question

I'm honestly surprised nobody has ever asked this. I'm a native-level speaker of Mandarin Chinese and English and yet I don't know.

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In case you don't know what 发票 is, here's a short explanation:

In mainland China, when you sell anything as a business, you are legally obligated to provide your customer with two certificates on request: 收据 (receipt) and 发票 (?). 收据 is self-explanatory and is the same as in any other country; 发票 is like 收据, but it also states some extra information. For example:

• The name and taxation ID of the seller.
• The name and taxation ID of the buyer (when buying on behalf of a company/organisation).
• The amount of tax included in each item's price.

Notably, unlike 收据, 发票 also has a unique serial number like bank notes, which allows taxation agencies to more accurately track sales. This makes 发票 much more legally binding than 收据. For this reason, most people usually only request 发票 when making large purchases, and/or buying on behalf of their employer and are looking to get reimbursed, which is known as 报销 (lit. reporting expenditure).

There are multiple types of 发票 as well, but we'll ignore that here.

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The trouble is that this concept simply doesn't really exist (or rather, very rarely exists; thanks for @JustinHancock for pointing this out in the comments) outside of China. It reminds me of that time when an American translator was struggling to translate Прописка (Propiska, basically 户口) to an American president (I think it was Nixon but I could be wrong). He ended up calling it "domestic passport" in case you're curious.

Anyways, I've searched far and wide for an official (or at minimum, good-looking) translation for 发票 and I am yet to see one. Here are some common ones:

• Invoice/bill: Inaccurate; that's 账单.
• Receipt: Inaccurate; that's 收据.
• Fapiao: 🤦 No.

So I suppose the best option is to coin a term that best describes its purpose, which turns out to be extremely difficult to do concisely. Here are some that I came up with (none of which I'm satisfied with):

• Tax ticket: "Ticket" sounds wrong. In most use cases it's associated with "permission to do", e.g. train ticket 火车票, concert ticket 演唱会门票, which is not the case with 发票.
• Tax certificate: It sounds better, but it can be easily confused with 完税证明, which is a document certifying that you have paid your taxes.
• Tax receipt: Sounds like 完税证明 even more.
• Taxable receipt: This makes it sound mutually exclusive with a "normal receipt", which is not the case. You can (and people often do) request both 收据 and 发票.

The best I've got is expenditure certificate, which accurately describes its use from the POV of the purchaser. But funnily, this term literally translates to 报销凭证, which is a word already in use that refers to a category of documents similar to but distinct from 发票. It's all very confusing, I know.

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So, help. I recognise that this is a difficult question and there might not be a good answer. So all I'm asking for is some brainstorming from the community. Thank you.

Answer 1

发票 = Certificate of Dispatch (发货的凭据). The original meaning is that "this is to certify that you have received this much of merchandise". While 收据 = Certificate of reception, meaning "I have received this much cash or goods".

Both words are used in modern business in China. Most of the time, they mean the same thing. Before the application of computers, the sells person may give you a couple of pages of paperwork in different colors (yellow, green, pink, etc.) The paper you need to hand to the gate guards is called 发票 (发货单). The paper you need to give to your accountant is called 收据.

Answer 2

Proviso: not a businessman, but 发票 is not just 发票：

增值税普通发票
Ordinary Sales Tax Added Receipt

增值税专项发票
Special Sales Tax Added Receipt

Ordinary Sales Tax Added Receipt is used when you pay something for your company and then want the money back from your boss. （报销）

The Special Sales Tax Added Receipt is the one you need to try to get a tax rebate from the tax office.

At least in international trade, 发货的凭据 would, probably, according to my friend who works in foreign trade, be the packing list, which is really just information for the customs and contains HS codes, amounts of items, number of boxes 等等。

Answer 3

How about Tax Invoice?

Not a native speaker but learning Mandarin for a while now. While 发票 has not popped up in my lessons yet, I did come across this at work where my company needed to implement the 发票 system for our customers in China (we are a website).

While we just call it "Fa Piao" even at work (where we speak English), my Chinese coworker once translated it for our director using the term "Tax Invoice".