Fifteen hundred payments, not one invoice

After every payment Stripe sends a neat receipt with the business's name on it. It does not become a Hungarian invoice. A Hungarian invoice has to carry the data the law prescribes — the seller's tax number, the buyer's name and address, the VAT rate or a reference to the exemption — and if invoicing software issues it, that software reports it to the tax authority, NAV, on its own at the moment of issue. Stripe says itself that its invoicing does not produce legally compliant e-invoices.

Whoever takes payments through Stripe in Hungary therefore also has to issue a Hungarian invoice after every successful charge, and that chain can break silently. One of the connectors, SzámlaBridge, describes it in its own FAQ: if the Stripe key is replaced but not updated in the bridge, invoicing stops without an error message, and at one of their users more than fifteen hundred payments were left without an invoice this way. This piece goes through five routes, based on the vendors' own documentation and pricing, as they stood on 28 September 2026. I build custom solutions myself, so I have an interest here — which is why the table only states what each vendor says about itself.

What any solution has to do

• Invoice at once. If the money arrives by the date of supply at the latest — as with a prepaid subscription — the invoice has to be issued without delay (VAT Act 163. § (2) b)).
• Report every invoice to NAV, including those to private individuals, by machine, without human intervention. Under the small-business VAT exemption too.
• Invoice only successful payments. A failed renewal has to be skipped.
• On a refund, issue a cancelling or corrective invoice, referring to the original, with the same deadlines (170. §).
• Collect the buyer's name and address — on the payment page, with the billing address.

The five routes

Two names are missing from the list, and that is information too. Neither Billingo nor Számlázz.hu has a tool of its own that turns a Stripe payment into an invoice: Billingo works the other way round, putting a Stripe payment link on its invoices, and Számlázz.hu points to SzámlaBridge. Zéró Számla, promised for March 2026, had not launched by the end of September.

Which one when

• Few invoices, Számlázz.hu, a simple subscription: SzámlaBridge is free. According to its own FAQ, though, it can stop silently after the Stripe key is changed, and the cancelling invoice for a refund has to be issued by hand — worth checking on regularly.
• You use Billingo: Kapocs, or SzámlaBridge's Billingo connection, which is still in beta in September 2026.
• You would rather not hand over your Stripe secret key: Szamlazo API connects as a Stripe app with read-only access, and reports to NAV itself. In exchange, it is a new service, and you have to create the NAV technical user yourself.
• The invoice is part of a larger system — admission, expiry, refunds with automatic cancellation —: a custom build. How that works is covered in a separate article.

The deadlines

Under the Hungarian VAT Act the invoice is due at the time of supply, or within a reasonable time after it (163. § (1)). If payment was made by the date of supply at the latest, or an advance was paid, without delay (163. § (2) b)) — since 15 July 2023 regardless of the payment method. For payment after supply on an invoice with VAT the deadline is eight days; for intra-EU reverse-charge services, the 15th of the following month.

Stripe's Hungary VAT guide (16 March 2026) gives the 15th of the following month as the general rule; under the Act that applies only to the intra-EU reverse-charge case. For subscriptions the date of supply is the last day of the period — but if both the payment due date and the invoice fall before the period ends, it is the invoice date (58. §).

The receipt as another route

For a private buyer, a receipt (nyugta) can replace the invoice if the gross amount is under HUF 900,000, payment was made by the date of supply, and the buyer does not ask for an invoice (165–166. §). From 1 September 2026, receipts not issued on a cash register have to be reported to NAV within three calendar days, summed per day. Stripe's receipt is not such a receipt either: it would have to be in Hungarian, with the seller's tax number.

Under the small-business VAT exemption

The invoice still has to be issued and reported to NAV. It may not show passed-on VAT, a VAT rate or a percentage, and it has to refer to the exemption (187. § (2) c), 169. § m)); invoicing services use the code AAM for this.

What a custom build has to watch

• For subscriptions, invoice on invoice.paid; for one-off payments, on checkout.session.completed — and not twice for the same payment when both arrive.
• The same event can arrive twice, and out of order. Számla Agent helps here: for the same order number within two days it returns the earlier invoice.
• On a refund, the cancelling invoice should come from the charge.refunded event.
• If invoicing gets stuck, that should raise an alert, not just a log line — the deadline is “without delay”.

Sample code for such a build is available from me as open source: stripe-szamlazz-hu.

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