Europe, say goodbye to the emailed invoice
France has four weeks to change how 10 million businesses bill each other. On September 1st, two things happen:
- Every business must be able to receive an invoice as data. A PDF on its own is no longer sufficient. No exemptions for being a small business, either. If you can't receive one of three structured data formats for e-invoicing, your business effectively becomes unbillable.
- Large and mid-sized companies must be able to issue structured electronic invoices. The original plan was a state portal where anyone could send and receive properly formatted invoices at no cost. That got cut back, so French businesses are on their own to adopt a compliant sending setup.
France is one ripple in a wave of regulation rolling through Europe. New rules are being made in step with the E.U.'s VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) directive, adopted in March 2025. Over the next four years, European countries will overhaul their B2B transaction standards and reporting requirements to curb deficits in VAT collection and fraud.
This year, many countries have started implementing those changes with e-invoicing.
One thing has been clear from the rollout thus far: e-invoicing is complicated, and it's something European businesses are generally unprepared for. In one survey of European finance and tax teams, roughly nine in ten said their business was ready for e-invoicing and live reporting. However, only about a third had actually built the proper tools for it.
If you’re a European user of Slash, we want you to be prepared. Here's how e-invoicing works, why European governments want it, and what your business should do to remain compliant with the new rules in your region.
What's changing under the new invoicing regulations
Invoices are written for people, not computers. Software reading a PDF guesses where the line items and totals are, and sometimes guesses wrong. Structured e-invoicing removes the guessing: the invoice becomes a machine-readable file, usually XML, and the human-readable version becomes optional. Europe has a standard for what that file must contain, EN 16931, which defines the fields an invoice needs and what each one means.
Almost no country uses that standard exactly as it's written. Each publishes its own national version, deciding which optional fields are mandatory locally and adding its own tax codes and validation rules. Germany's is called XRechnung. Slovenia's is e-SLOG 2.0. Belgium skipped writing one and adopted an international profile instead, while Italy and Spain use national formats that predate the European standard altogether.
Here's the problem: an invoice that passes in Germany won't necessarily pass in Poland, even though both abide by the same European standard. Sell into three countries and you are dealing with three sets of formatting rules, each revised whenever its government decides to revise them.
No business is expected to track all of that, which is why most of Europe will begin routing invoices through specialized delivery networks instead, the largest being Peppol.
It works like email, but for invoices: every participant has an ID, usually derived from a company registration or VAT number, and a lookup tells the sending provider where to deliver. Your provider converts the invoice into the format the destination country requires and validates it against that country's rules before it goes anywhere.
Why this is happening
Europe has a €128 billion problem. That is roughly the amount of VAT that European governments were owed in 2023 and did not collect, according to the European Commission, or about 9.5% of the VAT that should have been collected. The gap widened by 1.6 percentage points on the previous year, reversing several years of improvement. VAT brings in close to 16% of total government revenue across the EU, so a hole that size needs to be plugged.
There is a second motive, which is administrative cost savings. Once tax authorities hold invoice-level data, a lot of the existing filing apparatus becomes redundant. France's own business case projected savings in the region of €4.5 billion, working out to somewhere between €7 and €10 per invoice. Croatia used the transition to scrap two of its existing reporting lists outright.
Which leaves the question of why all of this is arriving at once.
Before ViDA, a member state that wanted to require e-invoicing had to apply for a formal exemption from the VAT Directive and wait for approval. Italy, Poland, Germany, France, Belgium and Romania all went through that process. However, ViDA removed the application requirement. The queue that had built up for approval cleared more or less simultaneously. That is why 2026 looks like a coordinated European rollout, when it is really a dozen national decisions that culminated at the same time.
Who has to do what, and when
The deadlines ViDA imposes are set: real-time reporting on cross-border B2B trade within the EU from July 2030, and by 2035, every country running a domestic system of its own has to bring it into line with the European standard. Already, 8 European nations have fully or partially adopted the changes.
The pattern to notice across almost every country is that the obligation to receive structured invoices lands before the obligation to send them. Governments sequence it that way because there is no point requiring businesses to send structured invoices until there is somewhere to send them. If you take one thing from the table below: the first deadline has nothing to do with how most businesses send invoices. It's about whether they can properly receive them.
Here is the list of all the European countries with established and upcoming e-invoicing regulations to take effect:
One caveat for these dates. Almost every 2026 mandate had some form of enforcement cushion, and several dates have already been moved. Poland waived penalties for its first year. France has extended lenient enforcement to the end of December and says penalties will be assessed case by case rather than applied automatically. Latvia and Spain both pushed their dates back outright. While the obligations are in effect from day one, the punishment, in most cases, is not.
What businesses need to do
1. Work out where you are established, not just where you have a VAT number
Most of these mandates apply only to businesses established in the country. Belgium explicitly excludes foreign companies that hold a Belgian VAT number without being established there. Poland went the other way and captured foreign VAT-registered companies with no fixed establishment. Greece generally excludes them. There is no rule of thumb here; it has to be checked country by country.
2. Clean up your customer and supplier data
Structured invoicing is unforgiving in a way that PDFs never were. A missing VAT number, an incomplete address, a company name that doesn't match the register: under the old system these were mild annoyances. Under the new one they are rejection errors. On the day the mandate starts in your country, you may encounter rejections without cleaning up some old, bad habits.
3. Solve receiving before you worry about sending
Receiving obligations come first and apply to everyone. Find out which delivery channel your country uses: most of Europe runs on the Peppol network, while Italy, Poland, Romania and Greece use a government platform. Check whether your accounting software already supports it, and if not, sign up with a service provider. That is also what gets you into the directory, the address book other companies' systems check to find out where to send your invoices.
4. Understand invoice rejection rules if they apply
In Italy, Poland, Romania and Greece, invoices pass through a government platform before they reach the buyer, and the platform can refuse them. An invoice it refuses isn't a flawed invoice waiting to be corrected. Legally, it never happened. Nothing was issued, nothing is owed, and the transaction stops until someone starts again from the beginning.
5. Check your archiving, because the rules diverge
Germany requires invoices to be kept for eight years in their original structured format, which means keeping the data file itself rather than a printout or a PDF copy of it. Belgium requires seven years. Poland's government platform retains for ten and acts as the official record. If your process is "save the PDF," it probably isn't enough.
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