Drawing up, calculating and sending invoices by hand is a thing of the past, and a fully digitised program takes it off your hands. In Belgium, this will be the new reality from 1 January 2026. From that moment on, e-invoicing becomes the mandatory standard, with the Peppol platform playing the central role.
Our southern neighbours are seeing this deadline creep ever closer, and in Germany this standard has already become reality. There, all domestic transactions between businesses switched fully to e-invoicing from 1 January 2025. How long will it be before the Netherlands follows suit? And, perhaps even more importantly, what exactly changes for you as an entrepreneur?
These countries' decision to switch over completely didn't come out of the blue. There has been talk of making e-invoicing mandatory for quite some time. On 5 November 2024, the European Union reached a unanimous political agreement on the 'VAT in the Digital Age' (ViDA) proposal. The proposal has almost been finalised. Among other things, it states that all EU member states must have switched fully to e-invoicing by 1 July 2030 at the latest, both between businesses (B2B) and for businesses dealing with the government (B2G).
At the moment, e-invoicing is already mandatory in most countries for transactions with government bodies and other contracting authorities (B2G). This also applies to the Netherlands. By extending this to the entire B2B sector as well, the European Union hopes to tackle many problems such as phishing, data theft and VAT fraud. What's more, your bookkeeping becomes a lot clearer because a single uniform platform will soon be used across the whole. EU, Peppol.
In the Netherlands, some entrepreneurs already use e-invoicing because it saves time, reduces errors and makes bookkeeping a lot simpler. That said, no general obligation has been announced yet. From next year, e-invoicing will be mandatory in Belgium for all B2B transactions, including transactions with Dutch businesses. So if you do a lot of business with our southern neighbours, it's wise not to wait too long.