Compliancy

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To exchange e-invoices and other electronic documents such as orders, despatch advices and goods receipts, you need a network operator and a sending / receiving system that supports compliant formats, meets your process requirements, and provides visibility. While it may sound like a lot, getting an operator & service provider in one with decades of experience, will take care of all of it for you.

We encourage keeping up to the newest formats, even if it may feel less important when you utilize e-invoices daily on an older format or environment. The newest formats allow unifying your e-invoices, as they align you with the same semantic data model as used by others, both nationally and internationally. You can send and receive invoices broadly with more clarity and less time spent on issue solving, not to mention your improved ability for invoice automation. All of this leads to cost savings, ensuring great return on your investment - but most of all, provides you peace of mind.

Legal compliancy

Where legal compliancy is relevant for all countries, there is always variation in the national rules. For suppliers, it means ensuring you're compliant in the countries that you sell to, whereas buyers apply the compliancy of your own country. National variance can be seen in terms of content (what invoice elements are mandatory and how their content must be provided), integrity and authenticity (ensuring integrity by e.g. digital signature, EDI and business control), and especially in archive compliancy (how long you archive, how you ensure authenticity, who has access, etc.).

Partner & internal compliancy

While we encourage all our customers to make use of the many benefits brought by standardization, we have the ability to provide, e.g. point-to-point integration and routing in addition (or in combination with) the open network connectivity. Further, our services support different electronic message standards and formats available on the market, and our invoice sending and receiving services enable you to combine all your channels and formats, be it e-invoices, PDFs or paper, into one, fully integrated flow. Let's find the best solution for your business together!

The EU e-invoicing directive

Within the EU Member States, all organizations from the public to private sector, and companies of nearly all sizes, are obliged to consider the EU regulation on e-invoicing for invoice sending and receiving.

The European Directive on electronic invoicing (EN 2014/55 / EU) didn't only mandate for the public sector to support EN compliant e-invoicing. It also promoted the uptake of e-invoicing and started a shift to reduce complexity and legal uncertainty in using e-invoices across the Member States. Adding to the directive, then, the European standard on e-invoicing, EN16931 from 2017, defines the semantic data model for the core elements of an electronic invoice. The regulation is targeted to public and private companies as invoice senders and receivers, but it has and continues to affect also the economy in general.

Where all of this may sound complicated, worry not. A compliant invoice and supply chain e-document exchange service will take care of it for you, while improving your efficiency and accuracy. And it's all for your benefit.

Compliancy is beneficial in many ways

Leads to less paper, less PDFs, less manual work

Structured data allows efficiency and automation

Adds to clarity between the parties and reduces errors in the invoice content

Allows continuous archiving of all that's been sent and received, in a structured manner

Enables touchless automation, invoice data enrichment, 3-way matching, and more

Structured data for content compliancy

To be legitimate, invoices in the EU must now contain the mandatory data defined in the e-invoicing standard. However, each Member State has had the possibility to implement the regulation to meet the national needs.

Keeping the common elements mandatory is beneficial for, for example, automatic processing and enabling seamless transformation of compliant invoices between different formats. Therefore, the mandatory fields in the national format must be in accordance with the standard. For example, invoice number and invoice date must be compliant to provide the information required in a VAT invoice.

How this is done in practice varies from country to country, and the national requirements must be met by the service provider for all invoice sending and receiving. The OpusCapita Business Network services come with specifically developed technology and our team with years, if not decades, of experience to ensure compliancy both nationally and internationally, especially within Northern Europe.

National variance

NATIONAL LAWS

E-invoicing in Finland

By law, all companies in Finland are entitled to receive invoices in a compliant electronic format at request, and e-invoicing is mandatory with the authorities. This factsheet describes in detail how to meet the regulation in TEappsXML 3.0 and Finvoice 3.0.

View the factsheet

PEPPOL

E-invoicing in Sweden & Norway

The earlier national formats for e-invoicing the public authorities are being vastly replaced by PEPPOL Billing BIS 3, and the same change can be seen among private companies, as well. Svefaktura 2.0 in Sweden is expected to expire soon, and EHF 3.0 in Norway already matches PEPPOL.

Discover PEPPOL

How is PEPPOL related to compliancy?

PEPPOL is not part of the EN16931 standard. However, it is one possible interoperable infrastructure to comply with the regulation. Moreover, PEPPOL provides a structured way to maintain different country rules in one infrastructure. PEPPOL BIS3 is EN compliant with the UBL invoices including different national rules within it. There are national differences in how PEPPOL is used for EN compliant e-invoicing. Denmark, Austria, Croatia, and Finland use PEPPOL in parallel with their national schemas. On the contrary, Sweden, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, Cyprus, and Germany use it as the main infrastructure.