What Are the Types of CFDI and Why Are There 5?
The types of CFDI are the five classifications Mexico's tax authority, the SAT, uses to distinguish what kind of transaction each electronic invoice (CFDI) covers: income (ingreso), expense/credit note (egreso), goods transfer (traslado), payroll (nómina), and payment receipt (pago). This isn't a minor detail: each type carries its own code (I, E, T, N, P) and its own specific use, and stamping a CFDI with the wrong type can make it invalid for tax deduction or VAT credit purposes.
If your business sells, pays salaries, moves inventory across Mexico, or collects payments in installments, at some point you'll need more than one of these five receipts. Here's what each type does, when it applies, and the most common mistakes companies make when choosing the wrong one.
Income CFDI (Type I)
The income CFDI is the most common type: it covers the sale of goods, the provision of a service, or any transaction that represents income for whoever issues it. It's the receipt you stamp when invoicing a product, a professional service, a rental, or any foreign-trade transaction where your company is the one getting paid.
This is the type most businesses issue day to day. If you're unsure which receipt to issue and the transaction involves you being paid, it's almost always an income CFDI.
Expense/Credit-Note CFDI (Type E)
The expense CFDI doesn't represent a new sale — it exists to correct or reduce the effect of income already invoiced. It's used for returns, discounts applied after the sale, and rebates, and it's also how a company subtracts amounts from an income invoice that was issued with errors the client already accepted.
In practice, an expense CFDI almost always carries the UUID of the income invoice it's correcting. The document that formalizes this kind of adjustment day to day is the credit note; you can see how to issue one in our guide to the credit note.
Transfer CFDI (Type T)
The transfer CFDI doesn't cover income or a sale at all — its only job is to prove that goods are moving legally from one point to another, with no purchase-and-sale transaction behind it. Companies use it, for example, to move inventory between their own warehouses or to deliver goods on consignment.
When that transfer happens by road and needs to be documented for the authorities, the transfer CFDI is paired with the Carta Porte complement. If your business moves goods by land within Mexico, it's worth reading our guide to the carta porte to know when it's required.
Payroll CFDI (Type N)
The payroll CFDI is the receipt every employer in Mexico must stamp each time it pays salaries, wages, or comparable compensation. Unlike the other types, it always includes the payroll complement, which itemizes earnings, deductions, days worked, and the income-tax and social-security withholdings that apply to each employee.
This receipt follows its own rules for frequency and stamping deadlines that don't apply to the other CFDI types, which is why many companies manage it through a process separate from the rest of their invoicing. We cover the details in our guide to the payroll CFDI.
Payment CFDI (Type P)
The payment CFDI — also known as the payment complement or REP (Recepción de Pagos) — is issued when an income invoice gets paid after it was already stamped, whether in installments or as a single deferred payment. It doesn't replace the original invoice; it complements it, recording how much was paid, when, and through what method.
This type is often confused with the income CFDI because both relate to a collection, but they serve different purposes: the income CFDI invoices the transaction, while the payment CFDI documents that the collection actually happened. You can find the full breakdown in our article on the payment complement.
How to Know Which Type of CFDI You Need
The simplest way to identify the right type of CFDI is to ask what's actually happening with the money or the goods in that specific transaction:
- If you're getting paid for a sale or a service: income.
- If you're correcting or reducing an invoice already issued: expense.
- If you're moving goods with no sale involved: transfer.
- If you're paying salaries to your staff: payroll.
- If you're recording payment for an invoice that was settled after it was issued: payment.
Choosing the right type of CFDI has nothing to do with company size — it depends entirely on the exact nature of each transaction. A single business can need all five types in the same month: a store selling on the spot (income), accepting a return (expense), moving inventory between branches (transfer), running biweekly payroll (payroll), and collecting on last month's credit sale (payment).
Common Mistakes When Choosing the Comprobante Type
The most frequent invoicing mistakes in Mexico tend to repeat across businesses of every size:
- Using an income CFDI pay period after pay period instead of a payroll CFDI, which leaves the employer without the required complement and exposed to SAT review.
- Issuing a new income CFDI instead of an expense CFDI to correct an invoice already stamped, which duplicates the reported income instead of correcting it.
- Invoicing a transfer between a company's own warehouses as income, creating taxable income where no actual sale ever took place.
- Forgetting the payment complement when a sale is collected on a date different from the invoice date, which can invalidate the deduction for whoever received the receipt.
- Linking the wrong UUID of the original invoice on an expense or payment CFDI, leaving the adjustment disconnected from the receipt it's meant to correct.
Most of these mistakes go away with an invoicing system that automatically validates which comprobante type applies to each transaction, instead of leaving that decision to whoever happens to be issuing the invoice.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many types of CFDI exist in Mexico?
The SAT defines five main comprobante types: income (I), expense (E), transfer (T), payroll (N), and payment (P). Each one has its own code and its own issuing rules.
Can I use an income CFDI for everything?
No. The income CFDI only covers transactions where your company is being paid for a sale or a service. Corrections, goods transfers, payroll, and later collections each require their own type of receipt.
What happens if I issue the wrong type of CFDI?
The receipt can lose its tax validity for whoever received it, and fixing it means cancelling the CFDI and re-stamping it with the correct type — with the risk that the allowed cancellation window has already passed.
Does a transfer CFDI generate income for my company?
No. The transfer CFDI only certifies that goods are moving legally from one place to another; it doesn't represent a sale and doesn't create a tax obligation on its own.
How do I get my invoicing system to pick the right comprobante type?
By defining clear rules based on the type of transaction — sale, correction, transfer, payroll, or later collection — and ideally automating that classification so it doesn't depend on every user remembering the difference between the five types.
Picking the right type of CFDI for every transaction gets a lot easier when your invoicing system does it for you. At AISDC we build electronic CFDI invoicing that automatically generates the receipt that applies — income, expense, transfer, payroll, or payment — connected to your sales, collections, and payroll processes.