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Practical guides to running your business on Mac, iPad and iPhone: invoicing, projects, time tracking and working with the AI assistant.
KSeF is Poland's national e-invoicing system: invoices are sent in a Polish structured format to a central government platform, which numbers each one. Peppol is a network of access points that delivers invoices between businesses. In Poland, Peppol is used for public procurement.
EN 16931 is the European standard for electronic invoices. It defines which details an invoice carries and how each is defined, as numbered business terms and business rules, and that content can be written in two XML syntaxes: UBL and UN/CEFACT CII.
A Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 e-invoice is an XML file in UBL 2.1. It opens with two identifiers naming the rules it follows, then holds the header, seller and buyer, payment details, VAT totals and lines, each in a fixed element the receiver's software reads.
A Peppol BIS Billing invoice needs the EN 16931 basics (number, date, currency, both parties with addresses, totals, lines with a VAT category) plus Peppol's own rules: an electronic address for seller and buyer, and a buyer reference or purchase order reference.
ViDA, short for VAT in the Digital Age, is an EU package in force since April 2025. Its biggest change arrives on 1 July 2030: invoices for business sales between EU countries must be structured e-invoices, and their data is reported to tax authorities.
Sending an e-invoice from a phone or tablet works the same way as from a computer: your invoicing software builds the structured invoice and its Peppol provider delivers it. What changes on a small screen is the checking, so keep a short list of fields to confirm before you send.
German businesses have had to accept e-invoices since 1 January 2025. Sending them is phased in: any business may still send other invoices until the end of 2026, smaller ones until the end of 2027, and from 2028 e-invoices are the rule between German businesses.
From 1 September 2026, every VAT-liable business established in France must be able to receive e-invoices, and large and mid-sized companies must issue them; smaller ones issue from September 2027. Suppliers without a French establishment generally stay outside the e-invoicing duty but may have to report sales data.
To get ready to receive e-invoices, connect through a Peppol provider, register your Peppol ID, tell your suppliers, decide who checks each incoming invoice, run a test with one supplier, and agree where the structured files are kept and how they reach your accountant.
A Peppol access point is the service that connects your software to the Peppol network and sends and receives e-invoices for you. You need access to one to use Peppol, but you rarely run your own: many businesses connect through their invoicing software or a Peppol service provider.
To send an e-invoice over Peppol, your software connects through a Peppol service provider, you add the customer's Peppol ID, and you fill in the fields the rules require. The provider checks the invoice, finds the customer's provider and delivers it.
To receive e-invoices over Peppol, you register a Peppol ID through a service provider. Suppliers' software looks you up, sends the structured invoice to your provider, and your provider passes it to your software, where someone checks it before it is approved and paid.
Peppol is a shared set of rules, document formats and a network that lets one business's software send structured e-invoices to another's. Each side connects through a Peppol service provider of its choice, and the two providers deliver the invoice between them.
Since 1 January 2026, nearly all invoices between Belgian businesses liable to VAT must be structured electronic invoices, in practice sent over the Peppol network. A PDF by email no longer counts as the invoice for those transactions.
A PDF invoice is not an e-invoice. A PDF is a document for people to read, while an e-invoice is structured data, such as a UBL file following EN 16931, that the customer's software can read without retyping.
Sometimes. PEPPOL access is usually priced in one of a few ways: included in an invoicing plan, charged per document, sold as an add-on or higher tier, or contracted directly with an access point. Receiving is sometimes priced differently from sending, so count both before you compare.
