Grupo Venecam SpA administers commercial documentation for small suppliers in Santiago — issuing, acknowledging, filing and tracking the paperwork that a sale actually consists of. We do not buy invoices, we do not lend, and we do not collect anybody's debts.
We wrote this page because the two most important deadlines in a Chilean sale are automatic, short, and almost never diarised. Both of them pass in silence, and silence is what decides them.
Nothing is settled yet. The buyer can formally object to the invoice, and the supplier should be making sure the receipt of the goods or services is properly recorded.
The two clocks do different jobs and are often confused. The eight days decide whether the invoice is beyond argument. The thirty days decide when the money is late. A supplier can win the first and still be unpaid; a buyer can lose the first and still have thirty days.
What they have in common is that neither requires anyone to do anything. They run on their own, from the document, and both of them are decided by whoever did not act.
Not the date you wrote on the invoice, and not the date you emailed it. The periods run from the invoice being received in the correct sense for each rule, and the two rules do not define receipt identically. The single most valuable thing a small supplier can do is keep provable evidence of when the document and the goods were received — because every argument that follows is an argument about that date.
An invoice that carries executive merit can be enforced directly, without first having to prove the underlying sale all over again. That status is not automatic on issuing the document — it depends on conditions, and small suppliers routinely lose it on the last one.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary administration of a sale — and in a small business it is the work that gets done last, by whoever is least busy, which is why the deadline usually passes before anyone has looked at the file.
Parties can agree in writing to a payment period longer than thirty days, provided the agreement is not abusive toward the creditor. But such an agreement must be registered with the Ministry of Economy within five business days of being signed. If it is not registered in time, the agreement is void and the thirty-day default applies as though it had never been made.
This matters in both directions. A supplier told "our terms are ninety days" is entitled to ask whether that agreement exists in writing and whether it was registered. A buyer relying on extended terms that were never registered is relying on nothing.
Where payment is late, the legislation sets what follows rather than leaving it to the contract: interest calculated on a statutory reference basis, plus a fixed recovery commission equal to 1% of the outstanding balance. Suppliers frequently do not know this exists, and so do not claim it. Buyers frequently do not know it either, and are surprised by it.
An invoice can be assigned to a third party — this is how factoring works. The assignment is made by lodging a digitally signed electronic file with the tax authority's transfer registry, which is what legally notifies the buyer that the creditor has changed.
The consequence for a buyer is concrete and expensive: once an assignment has been properly registered and notified, paying the original supplier does not discharge the debt. The money has gone to somebody who is no longer the creditor, and the actual creditor can still demand payment.
Before paying any invoice of significance, check the transfer registry to see whether it has been assigned, and pay whoever the registry says is the creditor. It takes a moment, it is a public record, and it is considerably cheaper than paying twice.
Most commercial disputes here are not won or lost by argument. They are settled in advance by a deadline that ran while both sides were busy.
A buyer who says nothing for eight days has accepted the invoice, whatever they intended. Silence is not neutral — it is a decision the law makes on your behalf.
With no valid registered agreement to the contrary, the term is thirty days. Neither party has to invoke it and neither party can quietly ignore it.
An assignment registered and notified changes the creditor by itself. Paying out of habit, to the name you know, is how the same invoice gets paid twice.
Grupo Venecam SpA is a private company in Santiago providing commercial documentation administration to small suppliers. The work is clerical and it is deliberately narrow: issuing and filing documents correctly and on time, confirming that acknowledgements and delivery records exist, keeping the deadlines visible, and explaining in plain language what a document does.
The word "Grupo" is part of our registered name. It indicates no subsidiaries, no affiliates and no parent, and nobody else guarantees our obligations.
Where a matter needs a lawyer or an accountant — and enforcing an invoice does — we say so and stop. Describing how a deadline works is administration. Advising what to do about your particular dispute is a profession we do not practise.
We work from Nueva Tajamar 481 in Las Condes, by appointment. Please write or call before coming.