The most expensive mistake in a creator's tax life is not invoicing badly. It is believing that the monotributo covers everything that has to be paid, and finding out later that a tax was missing which is not a national one.
Ingresos Brutos exists, it is provincial, and it does not sit inside the monotributo. They are two different levels of government, with their own registers, their own deadlines and their own rules, and the first has no idea what you are doing with the second.
Two levels that do not talk to each other
The monotributo is a national regime. Ingresos Brutos is a tax of each province and of the City of Buenos Aires, and each jurisdiction runs it on its own.
That they are independent has an immediate practical consequence: being up to date with one says nothing about the other. A creator can have an impeccable monotributo for years and not be registered where they should be, and nothing in the national system will mention it.
It also means the question "do I have to pay Ingresos Brutos?" has no single answer for the country. It has one answer per jurisdiction, and it depends on where you carry out your activity.
Where you are and where your client is
That is the question that organises everything, and it has more combinations than you would imagine.
| Your situation | What usually applies | What you have to find out |
|---|---|---|
| You live and invoice in one province | registration in that jurisdiction | the local simplified regime, if it exists |
| You live in one province, all clients in another | activity may exist in both | where the activity is deemed carried out |
| Clients in several provinces | the Convenio Multilateral | how the base is allocated between jurisdictions |
| Clients abroad | export of services has its own treatment | what your jurisdiction says about that income |
| You moved province | registration in one, deregistration in the other | each one's deadlines, which do not match |
By contrast with the monotributo, where a single category settles the whole situation, here the answer is assembled jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and your neighbour's may differ from yours.
When the Convenio Multilateral appears
The Convenio Multilateral is the agreement between jurisdictions that exists precisely for the case where one activity is carried out in more than one. Without it, two provinces could each claim to tax the same income in full.
What it does, in one sentence, is allocate the taxable base between the jurisdictions where the activity actually occurs, instead of each one charging on the total.
For a creator the concrete question is when activity is deemed to exist in another province, and it is worth getting specific.
Having a client there is not enough on its own
That the invoice is addressed to a company in another province, or that the transfer comes from a bank there, is not in itself the test. If it were, anybody invoicing over the internet would be in every jurisdiction in the country at once.
What gets looked at is where the acts generating the income take place, and in work done from home those acts usually happen in a single place.
What does tend to count
Travelling regularly to film in another jurisdiction, sustaining a stable operation there, having a commercial presence or habitual expenses in that province. These are signs that the activity really is carried out in more than one place, and that is when the Convenio stops being theory.
A one off trip for a single shoot is not the same as a relationship sustained over a year. The difference lies in regularity, not in the isolated event.
Why you check beforehand rather than afterwards
Because the registration has a date and so does the activity, and making them line up retroactively means filing for past periods. A query before issuing the first invoice to a client in another jurisdiction costs a phone call; the same query two years later costs interest.
There is something uncomfortable and necessary to say: this is an area that moves. Collection regimes, registers and registration procedures change often and do not change identically across jurisdictions. Any list of steps you read, including the one in an article like this, has to be verified with your jurisdiction's authority on the day you use it.
The creator invoicing abroad
It is the most frequent situation among those working from Argentina for foreign brands, and the one that causes the most confusion, because it mixes two questions that are not answered in the same place.
The first is how that income is treated nationally, where export of services has its own regime and its own invoicing form. The second, which almost nobody asks, is how your jurisdiction treats it for Ingresos Brutos purposes.
And there is no single answer for the country. Some jurisdictions provide specific treatment for export income, others do not, and the criterion can depend on the activity and on how it is classified. The practical consequence is uncomfortable to accept and simple to apply: the treatment of your foreign invoicing has to be asked in your jurisdiction, not deduced from what you read about the national tax.
There is one concrete question worth taking to that conversation, because it settles it in two minutes: whether income from export of services forms part of the taxable base in that jurisdiction, and with what supporting documentation. The answer changes the figure you file every month.
What is best avoided is what happens most often, which is assuming that no local client means nothing to declare. It may be true in your case and it may not, and intuition is not what separates the two.
What to do, in order
- Find out what regime your jurisdiction has for monotributistas. Several have a simplified fixed fee scheme that settles the whole thing.
- Check whether all your clients are in the same jurisdiction. If they are, there is no Convenio and the matter is far simpler than it looked.
- If there are several, ask before invoicing, not after. Regularising backwards is the expensive part.
- Put the deadlines in the same place as the monotributo ones. They are different dates and that is the source of half the surcharges.
The honest objection is that this sounds like a lot of paperwork for somebody invoicing a few videos a month. It is a fair objection with a practical answer: the cost of being registered where you should be is low and predictable, and the cost of regularising three years later is not. The difference is not in the tax, it is in the interest and in the time it eats.
Why this always gets discovered late
There is a structural reason, and understanding it prevents the shock.
Ingresos Brutos rarely arrives as a notice. It arrives when a large client withholds a percentage when paying you, when a bank or a wallet applies a deduction on a credit, or when you try to register something in a jurisdiction and the system returns an old debt.
That is, it arrives as money that does not show up, not as a letter. That mechanism is covered separately, because it has its own logic and its own recovery procedures.
Anyone starting to invoice seriously therefore has two tasks that belong together and are usually done apart: sorting out the monotributo and finding out their provincial position. Doing only the first is what produces, a couple of years later, the call to the accountant nobody wanted to make.
Sources
Checked on 12 September 2026. This guide is not tax advice. Ingresos Brutos is a matter for each jurisdiction and its regimes change often: always verify with your province's or the City's authority before acting.
