What it is
Stamping (timbrar) means issuing a CFDI 4.0, Mexico's electronic tax invoice: the document is sealed with your hotel's digital seal certificate and certified by an authorized certification provider (PAC), which assigns its folio fiscal (UUID). The PDF and XML are stored in Invoicing and emailed to the customer.
You can invoice a reservation, a master account or a standalone invoice (a meeting-room rental, an event, a product).
When to use it
When a guest or a company asks for their invoice. A stay is invoiced from the guest's check-out onwards, once the reservation is fully paid. Before the first one, get the setup ready:
- In Settings → CFDI Invoicing (SAT): the issuer details exactly as they appear on the Constancia de Situación Fiscal (the SAT's tax status certificate), the digital seal uploaded and your hotel's PAC account connected. The screen includes a step-by-step guide.
- Your user needs the Emitir y reenviar facturas (CFDI) permission (issue and resend invoices).
Step by step
- In Invoicing, click New invoice → From a reservation and search by folio, guest, phone, email or room. You can also invoice from the reservation itself.
- Check the guest's tax details: RFC (taxpayer ID), name without the corporate-type suffix (no S.A. de C.V.), tax postal code, tax regime, invoice use and email. If the guest stayed before, the details from that stay are prefilled for you to review.
- Choose Whole stay or One part, if your hotel allows splitting a stay among several guests.
- Click Issue invoice. You will see the folio fiscal, and the PDF and XML go to the guest's email.
Master account and standalone invoice
With New invoice → From a master account, the company's details come preloaded; with Standalone invoice you enter them. In both, you add each line with its SAT product or service code, unit, quantity and price before taxes; choose the IVA (value-added tax) rate (16%, 8% border rate or 0%) and tick Includes ISH (state lodging tax) only on lodging lines. Validate without using a folio checks the invoice before Stamp invoice.
What can go wrong
- The name does not match the Constancia. The SAT rejects the invoice even if it looks like a typo.
- The stay is not fully paid, or more than 72 hours have passed since check-out. Containn will not invoice it outside that window, which starts when the guest checks out.
- The total does not match what was charged. If it is off by more than one cent, it is not issued, and the screen tells you the likely cause: a service charge or charges that are not on the reservation's lines.
- The reservation lacks the lodging tax, carries more than one other tax, or is not in pesos. Today, reservations are stamped in MXN with the ISH and, at most, IVA.
- General public. You cannot stamp to the generic RFC XAXX010101000 today: ask the guest for their RFC. A foreign guest without a Mexican RFC uses XEXX010101000.
- A stamping that did not get recorded shows up in To reconcile, so you never lose track of it.
Every invoice issued is linked to a daily póliza (journal entry): the CFDI column in Pólizas shows how many each one carries.