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Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

What’s your reference for the EU forcing this on businesses? The link you provided is only about Belgium.

As far as I see it, Belgium is the first to mandate it, and the rest of the EU will follow soon after. The European Commission is big on e-invoicing.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/D...

Don't know how it relates to PEPPOL, but Finland is pretty much all in on e-invoicing and has been for years. As a consumer, I get e-invoices from my building management, insurance company, the tax administration, my credit card company, my phone operator, my electricity company and even the place I order domestic domains from.

It's really nice though. I can set invoices to be paid automatically when they're under n€ and don't have to do anything to keep up with all of my payments.

Similar experience in Iceland.

Having moved over to the continent last year though, I am now having to deal with an enormous flood of paper.

Frankly if you are a business, having to pay a per year fee plus extra per invoice just so it all can be standardised and reduce the paper flood shouldn't be an issue, as long as the fees are not too great.

Italy switched to electronic invoicing a few years back. People complained for a while but it turned out to be quite painless in the end.

How did it compare to the PEPPOL costs and implementation requirements ?

I am surprised that you have to pay for sending invoices. Thats not an issue in Germany.

The problem, as far as I see it, isn't electronic invoicing in itself, or even the format. It's the usage of the PEPPOL network. The network isn't free. Nothing is stopping anyone from creating invoices in UBL format and sending those by email (or any other means). But in countries where usage of the PEPPOL network is required, that's no longer an option.

the old system was free and there were a few public systems that allowed you to manage things manually via web or apps (e.g. chamber of commerce associations, tax agency etc) but most people went through some SaaS service to manage invoices anyway, so my assumption is that the peppol costs would be absorbed by those now.

I'm not an invoice-using resident there so I don't know for sure, sorry.

Edit: quick googling found a few services that allow you to do electronic invoicing (peppol included) for €30/year.

This only seems to cover invoicing the public sector, I don't see anything about B2B there. The dashboard mentions, "15 countries introduced obligations for issuing B2G eInvoices".

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/D...

Ah now I see that in the fact sheet for every country they write if the legislation also introduces a B2B mandate.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/D...

So currently there are B2B mandates (some in the future) for: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Poland(?) and Romania.

Germany and France, at least, don’t have the issues mentioned here, as our e-invoicing standard is XML based (apparently now also compatible with PEPPOL XML) and doesn’t require an extra network with service fees or certifications.

That’s how EU directives usually work and this one seems to be from 2014. Saying “EU forcing” could as well be replaced with “European governments agreed on a single standard for e-invoicing in b2g and then also started to apply it in b2b”.

The only problem I see is certification requirements instead of just opened an API to where you can beam your signed xml blobs.

But there doesn't seem to be any EU directive?

I found this after entering the obvious query into the computer: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

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