SIBA — Boletins de Alojamento (Portugal)

Updated on 2026-10-01

Settings → Integrations → Guest experience → SIBA (Boletins de Alojamento)

Anyone offering accommodation in Portugal must report every foreign guest to the UCFE: the Boletim de Alojamento. This has to be done within three working days of arrival, per person, including children. The SIBA integration files this declaration automatically, based on the details your guests entered themselves in the guest registration.

You will find the SIBA (Boletins de Alojamento) tile in the Guest experience category, next to Guest registration. It only appears for a property in Portugal.

What you need in advance

The declaration runs through the SIBA web service, and for that your property must be registered in the secure area of siba.ssi.gov.pt. When registering, choose "Web Services" as the transmission mode — that choice is fixed, and with any other mode SIBA rejects every file with error code P12. It can only be changed by email to siba@sef.pt.

Within about 48 hours you will receive an ofício with three details:

Unidade hoteleira — your NIPC, nine digits
Estabelecimento number — the sequence number of this unit within the same NIPC; the first one gets 0
Chave de acesso — the activation key, digits only

If you have lost that key, request it again via siba@sef.pt with your NIPC and estabelecimento number. Do not register again — your existing registration remains valid, and a second registration creates a second estabelecimento.

Setting it up in BedFlow

First switch on Guest registration for the property, and under Details to request switch on the toggle Portugal: document type, country of issue and country of residence. Without those details, no boletim can be sent. See Guest registration.
Switch off the toggle "Belgian national register number as an alternative". It allows a guest to skip date of birth, nationality and document — which makes it unusable for a boletim.
Open the SIBA (Boletins de Alojamento) tile with Configure and, in the section Access (from the UCFE ofício), enter the three details from the ofício: Unidade hoteleira (NIPC), Estabelecimento number and Chave de acesso. The chave de acesso is stored encrypted and never appears in a log or error message.
In the section Unit details as known to SIBA, fill in the details of the unit. Mind the maximum lengths — SIBA rejects a file that exceeds them:

Field Max. length

Name of the unit 40

Abbreviation 15

Address 40

Town 30

Postcode 4 + 3 digits

Phone and fax 9 digits

Contact person name 40

Contact person email 140

Address, phone, fax and contact details are updated at SIBA with every submission. The name and abbreviation can only be changed via the UCFE.
Switch on Enable SIBA declaration and click Save.

Field	Max. length
Name of the unit	40
Abbreviation	15
Address	40
Town	30
Postcode	4 + 3 digits
Phone and fax	9 digits
Contact person name	40
Contact person email	140

For every accepted file, a confirmation from SIBA arrives at the contact person's email address. That is your second audit trail, alongside the overview in BedFlow.

How the declaration works

As soon as a guest fills in their registration, BedFlow prepares a boletim per traveller with the legal deadline: three working days after arrival, not counting weekends and Portuguese public holidays.
Portuguese guests are skipped. The reporting obligation only applies to foreign guests; reporting a Portuguese citizen results in a rejection. In the overview you see this as "skipped", so it is clear afterwards that nothing was sent on purpose.
Every morning, all outstanding boletins for guests who have already arrived are sent to SIBA in a single file. Reporting in advance is not possible: the arrival date must be today or earlier.
If SIBA replies with 0, the file has been accepted. Otherwise, the error code with its description is shown on the tile and BedFlow tries again in the next round.

What is monitored

The tile always shows three things: when something was last accepted, how many boletins are in the queue, and how many of those have exceeded the legal deadline. If anything goes past the deadline, you get a notification — reporting late is an offence, so it needs to be seen.

A boletim that gets stuck almost always has one of these two causes:

Incomplete details. The guest left a required field empty, or entered a country that SIBA does not have in its table. The reason is shown literally ("missing or invalid details: document type"). Complete it via the registration of that booking; it will go along in the next round.
A rejection by SIBA. The error code is shown on the tile. P12 means that the transmission mode of your registration is not set to Web Services; you solve that by emailing siba@sef.pt.

Important: one incomplete guest does not hold up the rest. Whatever is incorrect stays behind; everything else is sent as normal.

Guests arriving before the integration works

If the integration is not ready yet while guests are already arriving, notify your regional AIMA office with siba@sef.pt in copy. The SIBA FAQ explicitly provides for this in case of software problems (point P06).

What SIBA does not do

The boletins are a declaration to the authorities, not a tax and not an invoice. Your municipality's tourist tax and Portuguese invoicing via InvoiceXpress are completely separate from this — see InvoiceXpress (Portugal) and, for the municipal levy, VAT and tourist tax.