Cambodia — Retail & POS Localization

Cambodia prices in one currency, is paid in two, and wants the document in a third form of both. US dollars are commonly described as dominating retail pricing and cash, with the riel (KHR) circulating alongside and used for change below one dollar. The rules point the other way: a Ministry of Commerce prakas requires price tags in riel, and the invoice rules require the invoice total to be disclosed in riel at the National Bank of Cambodia's daily rate. The second requirement is that invoices be written in Khmer — and Khmer has no printer code page on any platform, so the invoice rule settles the print path before any other decision is made. The consumption tax is VAT at 10%, administered by the General Department of Taxation (GDT).

Verification status — partially verified, 2026-09

Researched 2026-09-24. Every item below was checked against secondary sources — tax-practice publications, a legal database summary, and the central bank's own payment-system pages for KHQR. Only the KHQR items were read from the authority itself. Confirm everything else against the instrument or the GDT before relying on it.

Found — reconfirm before relying on it

• VAT 10% standard rate; zero rate for exports and specified supplies.
• Two invoice types for a registered taxpayer: a tax invoice to a registered buyer, a commercial invoice to an end user. Small taxpayers issue commercial invoices only. (Prakas No. 723 MEF, 2019-08-14; GDT Notification No. 3218, 2020-02-06.)
• Invoices in Khmer, with any foreign language below the Khmer text.
• The invoice total must be disclosed in riel at the NBC daily exchange rate; the previous day's rate may be used before working hours or on non-working days.
• Invoice numbers run sequentially per year, with separate series per branch and per invoice type, and the rule is stated to apply to POS users.
• Price tags must be in riel; foreign-currency pricing needs a permit valid for one year (Prakas No. 172 MOC, 2017-07-07, amending Prakas No. 047).
• KHQR is the national QR payment standard, administered by the National Bank of Cambodia, and carries KHR or USD.
• E-invoicing platform CamInvoice launched by Prakas No. 075 MEF, 2025-01-22. Mandatory for business-to-government only; business-to-business voluntary; business-to-consumer out of scope.

Still open — TODO: verify

1. The VAT rate and zero-rated list against the current Law on Taxation.
2. Whether a POS slip handed to a walk-in customer is a commercial invoice under Prakas 723, or a separate document the prakas does not reach.
3. The complete mandatory field list for each invoice type, against the text of Prakas 723 and Notification 3218 rather than a summary of them.
4. Whether the riel disclosure rule applies to commercial invoices as well as tax invoices, and which rate date governs a sale rung up before the NBC publishes that day's rate.
5. Whether Prakas 172 is still the operative price-tag instrument, the number and date of the reported 2023 reiteration, and what enforcement looks like.
6. Whether any rule governs the rate a shop uses to give riel change on a dollar sale, or whether the shop's own rate is lawful.
7. Whether any private-sector business-to-business mandate on CamInvoice took effect in 2026, and when point-of-sale or consumer invoices come into scope.
8. Which body operates CamInvoice. The launching prakas names the General Department of Digital Economy; secondary sources name the GDT.
9. Taxpayer identification number (TIN / VATTIN) format and validation.
10. The thresholds that classify a taxpayer as small, medium or large, which decide whether the business may issue tax invoices at all.
11. The VAT registration thresholds.
12. Whether displayed consumer prices are legally required to be tax-inclusive.
13. Whether a retailer or restaurant reselling alcohol or tobacco must charge Public Lighting Tax on its own invoice, and at what base.
14. Invoice retention periods.
15. Whether receipts are expected to carry Khmer digits or Western digits.
16. What the NBC requires of a merchant to accept KHQR, and whether a merchant-presented dynamic code is required or customary.

Currency

Confirm the code and denominations against the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC).

Two currencies at one counter

The currency section in most files in this repository is about formatting. Here it is about arithmetic. The pattern commonly described — and consistent with the rules below, which exist because of it — is:

• The shelf price and the menu price are usually in US dollars.
• The customer pays in dollars, riel, or a mix of both.
• Change below one dollar is given in riel, because US coins do not circulate. The rate used at the counter is typically a round figure set by the shop rather than the NBC's daily rate. TODO: verify whether any rule governs it.

A till built for one currency cannot express this. The requirements are:

1. Tender in two currencies on one sale, with the amount received recorded per currency, not converted and summed.
2. Change calculated in a currency different from the price, with the remainder below one dollar converted to riel at a counter rate and rounded to the smallest riel note in practical use — TODO: verify which denomination that is; 100 riel is the smallest note commonly cited.
3. Two rates held at once: the counter rate used for change, and the NBC daily rate used on the invoice (see Tax). They differ, and conflating them makes either the drawer or the invoice wrong.
4. Drawer counts per currency. The shift close counts dollars and riel separately; a single converted drawer total hides every counting error behind the exchange rate.

Riel price tags are required. The Ministry of Commerce's Prakas No. 172 of 2017-07-07, amending Prakas No. 047, obliges traders, merchants and service providers to tag prices in Khmer currency, with foreign-currency pricing allowed for up to one year on approval — public-regulation, read from a legal database summary, not from the Khmer text. Press reporting describes a 2023 reiteration that requires any approved foreign-currency price to sit below or after the riel price, and describes enforcement as weak. TODO: verify both. For a system, the consequence is the same either way: shelf labels and menus need a riel price field that is maintained, not computed at print time from a dollar price, because a label printed at one rate and left on a shelf is a price claim at that rate.

Tax

Who issues which invoice. Per GDT Notification No. 3218 of 2020-02-06, implementing Prakas No. 723 MEF of 2019-08-14:

A medium or large buyer cannot claim input VAT on a purchase from a small taxpayer. That makes the issuer's size class a sales question, not only a filing question: a business supplying other businesses needs to know which class it is in before it chooses a till, because a till that cannot issue tax invoices is unusable for one class and irrelevant for the other. TODO: verify the classification thresholds.

The riel disclosure is not a display preference. A dollar-priced sale produces an invoice that has to carry a riel total at a rate the shop does not set and that changes daily. The system needs the NBC rate as dated reference data, stored against each invoice at issue, and reprinted from the stored value — never recomputed from today's rate.

Receipt requirements

Mandatory fields

From a tax-practice summary of Notification 3218 — not the text of the prakas, and TODO: verify in full.

Tax invoice

• Seller's name, address and TIN — public-regulation
• Sequential invoice number and date — public-regulation
• Buyer's name, address and TIN — public-regulation
• Description, quantity and price — public-regulation
• Total exclusive of taxes — public-regulation
• Each tax on its own line: Specific Tax, Public Lighting Tax, Accommodation Tax, VAT — public-regulation
• Signature and name — public-regulation
• Total in riel at the NBC daily rate — public-regulation

Commercial invoice

• Seller's name, address and TIN — public-regulation
• Sequential invoice number and date — public-regulation
• Buyer's name and address — public-regulation TODO: verify how this is met for an anonymous walk-in sale
• Description, quantity and price — public-regulation
• Total inclusive of all taxes — public-regulation
• Seller's signature and name — public-regulation TODO: verify how this is met on a printed POS slip
• Total in riel at the NBC daily rate — public-regulation TODO: verify whether this applies to commercial invoices

The two TODO items on signature and buyer name are the practical question for a retail counter, and they are open item 2 at the top of this file.

Language

Khmer, with any foreign language below it — public-regulation. GDT Instruction No. 1127 of 2016 stated this for invoices, and Notification 3218 restated it in 2020. The 2016 instruction was reported as allowing English for technical terms where a system could not render Khmer; TODO: verify whether that allowance survives.

This is the requirement that decides the print path. No code page exists for Khmer on any platform — see Khmer, Lao and Burmese — so a Khmer invoice from a thermal printer is a raster image, rendered by the POS with a shaping engine. A printer chosen for its code page support has chosen nothing here.

Numbering

• Sequential per year — public-regulation.
• A separate series for each branch and for the head office, and separate series for tax invoices and commercial invoices — public-regulation.
• Letter prefixes may distinguish branch series; they may not be used to split series by product, area or activity — public-regulation.
• Stated to apply to POS users — public-regulation.

Series is therefore a function of (branch, invoice type, year). A deployment that allocates a series per terminal — common elsewhere — produces a structure the rule does not describe. TODO: verify whether multiple terminals in one branch may share a series or must.

QR code

No QR obligation on a retail invoice identified. CamInvoice documents carry a verification code, but consumer invoices are not in CamInvoice's scope — TODO: verify.

Common paper widths

• 80 mm — fixed counters. Typically 576 dots at 203 dpi.
• 58 mm — handhelds. Typically 384 dots.

Character-per-line counts do not apply to the Khmer text: it is raster, and its width is measured in dots. A Khmer line with subscript consonants also needs more vertical space than a Latin line — set line height from the rendered Khmer, not from the Latin font.

Languages used in retail

Khmer is the official language and the language of the invoice. English is common in urban retail and in hospitality, and appears below the Khmer on bilingual invoices. Chinese is widespread in Chinese-owned businesses in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville.

Back office in one language, till in another — and the invoice in a third layout. The common split is a Chinese back office, a till that staff read in Khmer or English, and an invoice that has to be Khmer-first with English below. That is three independent settings:

• Back office language, per user.
• Till interface language, per user.
• Invoice template, pinned to Khmer-over-foreign regardless of either.

The product record needs a Khmer name that is stored and printed, not translated at print time, alongside whatever names the owner and staff read. A product catalogue imported from a Chinese supplier arrives without one; plan for the data entry.

Payment methods

A KHQR payment has a currency. A dollar-denominated code settles in dollars, and a riel-denominated code settles in riel. The tender record needs the currency of the payment as well as the amount, and the daily settlement reconciles per currency. A dollar-priced sale paid by a riel code is a conversion at the moment of payment, at a rate the POS must record.

Record a reference for every non-cash tender; confirmation at the counter is often visual.

Food service

Restaurants share the retail problems above — two currencies, Khmer-first invoices, riel disclosure — and add the usual ones.

Tax treatment

Service charge and tips

Receipt requirements specific to food service

Operating conventions

Trading day and the midnight boundary. TODO: verify whether any rule governs the accounting date of a sale after midnight. It interacts with the riel disclosure rule: a sale at 00:30 is converted at which day's NBC rate? Make the business-day boundary configurable, and record the rate date on the invoice independently of the business day.

Trading hours. TODO: verify for the intended segment.

Kitchen ticket language. A Chinese-reading kitchen, a Khmer- or English-reading floor, and a Khmer-first invoice is the expected configuration. The kitchen ticket has no legal language requirement identified and can stay in Chinese; it must be set independently of both the till and the invoice.

Notes for POS implementers

Four capabilities separate a food-service till from a retail one:

• Floor plan and table state — a sale is attached to a table, not opened and closed in one pass.
• Tab allocation — split by item and split evenly are different operations, and both get asked for. In Cambodia each split can also be paid in a different currency.
• Guest count — per-head reporting, and TODO: verify whether any document requires it.
• Tip adjustment — the amount must be adjustable after card authorisation without reopening the sale.

Split bills in two currencies. One table, three payers, one pays in dollars, one in riel, one by a riel KHQR code. Each part is a tender in its own currency against one invoice, which has one riel disclosure at one NBC rate. A split model that converts every payment to the bill currency at payment time loses what was actually handed over.

Order modifiers are not discounts, and void before and after firing are different events — as in every other food-service section of this repository.

Notes for POS implementers

Render Khmer as raster from the start. It is required on the invoice and no code page exists. Size the project on the printer's image throughput, and test with a Khmer product name containing subscript consonants, read by someone who reads Khmer.

Model currency per amount, not per sale. Price currency, tender currency, change currency and invoice disclosure currency are four fields that can each differ on one sale. A sale-level currency field cannot represent a normal transaction here.

Keep two rate tables and never merge them. The NBC daily rate is reference data with a date, used for the invoice disclosure and stored on each invoice. The counter rate is a shop setting, used for change. Reporting that converts at one rate will not reconcile against a drawer that was counted at the other.

Riel rounding is a remainder, not a discount. Converting the sub-dollar remainder to riel and rounding to a practical note leaves a difference of a few hundred riel. Record it as its own amount so the drawer and the sale agree.

Invoice series keyed on branch, type and year. Build it that way from the first release; migrating a live numbering scheme is harder than any other change in this file.

Watch CamInvoice for a consumer phase. Consumer invoices are out of scope today, and the published roadmap describes wider business coverage in 2026–2027. A POS that stores each invoice as structured data with seller TIN, buyer TIN, lines, taxes and the riel total is already most of the way to a UBL document; one that only stores print images is not.

Time zone. Indochina Time, UTC+7, no daylight saving. Asia/Phnom_Penh.

Last updated: 2026-09

Maintained by the MISAll team. Last updated: 2026-08