# Using your bank statement to find the IRS deductions you missed > A bank statement is not a fatura and never will be. It is still the fastest way to find the invoices that never made it to e-Fatura with your NIF on them. Source: https://trybica.com/guides/irs-deductions-from-your-statement/ Updated: 2026-08-18 --- Every February the same thing happens. People open e-Fatura, look at a list of invoices, decide it looks roughly right, and validate. What they cannot see on that screen is the invoice that is missing — because a purchase without your NIF on it leaves no trace there at all. Your bank statement is where that trace exists. It cannot be deducted, submitted or attached to anything, and the Tax Authority will never ask for it. What it can do is tell you what you actually paid for during the year, which is the only way to notice what e-Fatura does not know about. ## What the statement is and is not The deduction is built on the invoice, not the payment. An expense with no fatura carrying your NIF does not exist for IRS purposes, however clearly it appears on your account. So the statement has exactly one job here: comparison. Twelve months of spending on one side, e-Fatura's list on the other. Every category where the money moved and the invoices did not is either an invoice you forgot to ask for, or one the business registered without your number. This is worth doing once, in one pass, because the gaps cluster. People are consistent — the same dentist, the same garage, the same pharmacy tends to be missing every time, usually because nobody there ever asks for the NIF and you never think to give it. ## The categories worth checking against Deductible spending is not spread evenly across your life. It sits in a handful of buckets, and knowing which ones lets you scan a year quickly instead of reading it. **Health.** A percentage of what you spent, up to a household ceiling. Pharmacies, doctors, dentists, optics, health insurance. Most household health spending is small and frequent, which makes it the bucket where invoices most often go unregistered. **Education.** Tuition, books, school fees, tutoring, at a percentage up to its own ceiling — with a higher global ceiling when a student is living away from home under a registered rental contract. **Housing.** Rent on a permanent home, and interest on mortgages from contracts old enough to still qualify. Both are capped, and the rent ceiling has been rising in recent years. **Care homes.** Its own bucket, its own smaller ceiling, for a household member or a direct relative. **General family expenses.** A percentage of everything else with your NIF on it, up to a per-taxpayer cap that a normal year of groceries reaches without any effort. **VAT back on specific services.** A slice of the VAT you paid at restaurants and hotels, hairdressers, garages, vets, gyms and public transport comes back as a separate deduction with its own household ceiling — and public transport is the generous case. This is the bucket where the NIF is most often forgotten, because these are exactly the everyday, low-value purchases nobody stops to think about. Every percentage and ceiling in that list is set annually and moves. Confirm the current numbers on the Portal das Finanças before planning anything around them — the shape is stable, the figures are not. ## The calendar that actually matters Three dates, in this order, and they shift slightly year to year: 1. **Late winter — validation closes.** Invoices still sitting as pending, waiting for you to say which category they belong to, stop counting once the window shuts. Unclassified is not a neutral state; it is a lost deduction. 2. **Mid-March — the Tax Authority publishes your deduction amounts.** This is the first time you see the total the system believes in. 3. **End of March — the complaint window.** If the published amount is wrong, this is when you say so. After that it is settled. The order is the point. By the time you can see the total, you can no longer fix the invoices behind it. Anything you want counted has to be right before the first date. ## The habit that makes next year easy Everything above is repair work. The prevention is one sentence at the till, plus [a monthly ten minutes in the portal](/guides/efatura-and-your-bank-statement/) so the pending invoices never pile up — and the categories where it pays are predictable: the restaurants, the hairdresser, the vet, the garage, the pharmacy. The check is fast if your spending is already sorted. Pull the year by category — the [spending categories guide](/guides/spending-categories-that-work/) covers setting up categories that map onto real life — and compare each deductible bucket against what e-Fatura shows. Where the statement is bigger than e-Fatura, you have found the gap. Two details that catch people every year: invoices for a child or dependent land under whoever's NIF was given, not under whoever paid; and a business that registers your invoice under the wrong activity puts a health expense into general expenses, where the ceiling is far lower. Deductions do not reward the people who spend the most. They reward the people whose spending is documented — and documentation is a habit at the till, not a calculation in February.