A proforma invoice is a document that is used as a commitment to sell at a certain price.
Pro forma is a Latin phrase that refers to that which is developed in harmony with a form or a formality . The expression, which is usually written as pro-forma or pro forma , applies to those invoices or receipts that are used to justify operations carried out after the date of the account statement in which they are recorded.
A proforma invoice can be one that is sent to a buyer before the closing of the transaction . It is not a real invoice in tax terms, but rather it is a document that serves as a company's commitment to sell certain products at a certain price.
The proforma invoice
This type of pro forma invoice should therefore not be recorded in the accounts. It is used to specify in a document a sale that has not yet been completed. If the buyer accepts its terms, the sale is closed and the seller must issue the corresponding invoice in accordance with the provisions of the law .
In the field of international trade , the proforma invoice is usually delivered to customs when the actual invoice is not available at the time of shipment.
The notion of pro forma also appears in the field of law . In this case, it is a ruling whose sole purpose is to enable the development of a legal process. This type of ruling is due to a formality, and not to a specific need of the process.
In linguistics, proforma is the word or morpheme that can replace a phrase.
The concept in linguistics
Proforma, in the field of linguistics, is the morpheme or word that is capable of replacing a phrase , although, unlike this one, it does not have lexical content in itself, but rather its referent must be determined by the situation. communicative or by its antecedent .
The communicative situation is part of the theory of communication , and refers to the framework or context, the space and the moment in which any communicative process is carried out. The antecedent, for its part, is a noun, noun phrase (group of words that has a noun or pronoun as its nucleus) or proper name to which a pronoun refers ( relative or not). For example, in the sentence "I couldn't see the movie you recommended to me" , which is the relative pronoun and refers to the noun phrase the movie .
Types of proforma
It is possible to distinguish the following two groups of proforma:
* pronominal proforma : it is the pronoun , the most frequent type of proforma in our language. As explained in previous paragraphs, it serves to replace a noun phrase, but also a determiner (when the nucleus of the phrase is a determiner, that is, a morpheme that provides specialization or quantification). For example, in the sentence "I need to get that book" we can replace the noun phrase that book with the proforma lo , "I need to get it " ;
* non-pronominal proforma : this is a concept that does not exist in our language , but is useful to understand others such as Italian, French or Catalan. Its function is to replace a prepositional phrase, which has a preposition as a syntactic nucleus ( " history book" , "lacks experience " , "let's go there " ). In these languages, each with its differences and particularities, it is possible to replace a prepositional phrase (regardless of how long it is) with a single morpheme, similar to what happens in Spanish with the pronominal proforma.
The interrogative adverb
According to the work of certain authors, there is a type of proforma called an interrogative adverb , which includes words such as where , when and what , used to formulate questions in our language.
For example: « Where did you leave your glasses? I left them on my desk « , « When did you travel to Japan for the first time? My first trip was in 1972 « , «