Electronic Invoicing

USAC strongly encourages electronic invoicing for service providers that will bill USAC frequently and/or submit large numbers of invoice line items. Electronic invoicing speeds USAC processing. There won’t be a big time savings for service providers that only submit a few invoices or that submit only a few line items for each invoice. Those service providers should use the online filing option for the FCC Form 474, Service Provider Invoice (SPI) Form.

Electronic Invoice Process

Step 1: Service providers interested in submitting invoices to USAC electronically should email USAC and request setup information. In your email, please include the email address where you wish to receive Invoice Status Reports and your Service Provider Identification Number (SPIN), also known as your 498 ID. USAC will then send you a return email explaining the steps in the process.

You may use Pretty Good Protection (PGP) Software in order to encrypt electronic invoice submissions prior to submission. Once installed, the service provider may use PGP to send and/or receive encrypted files. This is optional and not required to submit an invoice.

Step 2: You must create your SPI Form in a comma-delimited (CSV) format, and send it as an email attachment to an email address that will be specified in the instruction materials sent by USAC. The file cannot contain more than 2500 lines and must be less than 200 KB in size.

USAC will send you a confirmation that we have received your submission. The file will then be processed and checked for errors. If there are errors in the file that prevent it from being processed, an error file [with an *.EIN extension] will be sent to the email address that is specified in the filename of the specific invoice file. Once any errors have been corrected, you can resubmit your invoice.

Once the invoice file has been validated, an Invoice Status Report (ISR) will be sent to the email address you specified when you signed up for electronic invoicing.