From 1 July 2030, cross-border B2B invoices in the EU must be structured e-invoices, reported within days. What changes, what stays and how a small company prepares.
In short
From 1 July 2030, an invoice for a business-to-business sale between two EU countries has to be a structured electronic invoice, and its data has to be reported to the tax authority within days of issue. That is the digital reporting requirement in the EU’s VAT in the Digital Age package, usually called ViDA, described by the European Commission. The rule replaces the recapitulative statement (the EC sales list) for those sales with reporting invoice by invoice.
Purely domestic invoices are not covered by the EU rule. Each member state decides whether and when to require e-invoicing at home, and several already have. Existing national reporting systems must line up with the EU standard by 1 January 2035.
Who decided this, and when
The European Commission proposed ViDA on 8 December 2022 with digital reporting starting in 2028, which is why older articles still say 2028. Member states took two years to agree. The finance ministers reached a political agreement on 5 November 2024, the Council formally adopted the package on 11 March 2025, it was published in the Official Journal on 25 March 2025 and entered into force on 14 April 2025.
The package is three legal acts: Council Directive (EU) 2025/516, which amends the VAT Directive, Council Regulation (EU) 2025/517 on administrative cooperation, and Council Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/518. Digital reporting is one of its three pillars; the other two cover platforms for short-term accommodation and passenger transport, and a single VAT registration for companies selling across the EU.
What counts as an e-invoice from 2030
An e-invoice in the ViDA sense is a file in a structured format that software can read, following the European standard on electronic invoicing, EN 16931, and the syntaxes listed under Directive 2014/55/EU. The Commission’s eInvoicing pages describe the standard. A PDF is not an e-invoice, and neither is a scanned paper invoice. Member states may permit other formats for domestic invoices as long as they can be read against the European standard.
For the cross-border invoices covered by the rule, the customer no longer has to agree to receive e-invoices. Countries that make domestic e-invoicing mandatory may drop that consent requirement too.
The deadlines
- The e-invoice has to be issued within 10 days after the chargeable event, the day the goods are delivered or the service is completed.
- The supplier reports the invoice data to its own tax authority at the moment the invoice is issued, or when it should have been issued.
- Where the customer issues the invoice under a self-billing arrangement, or where a member state requires the customer to report as well, the deadline on that side is five days.
- Summary invoices for a calendar month remain possible for these transactions, issued within 10 days after the month ends. Member states may exclude sectors they consider fraud-prone.
The data flows into a new central EU system, a successor to today’s VIES, where the supplier’s and the customer’s reports can be matched against each other.
Domestic invoices: each country decides, until 2035
Since the package entered into force in April 2025, a member state may require e-invoicing for domestic sales between businesses established in that country without first asking the EU for a derogation. Countries that already run their own real-time reporting have until 1 January 2035 to make it interoperable with the EU standard.
As of September 2026 the picture varies by country. Germany has required every business to be able to receive e-invoices since 1 January 2025, with issuing phased in during 2027 and 2028 (Federal Ministry of Finance). Belgium made structured B2B e-invoices mandatory from 1 January 2026 (FPS Finance). In France every business must be able to receive e-invoices from 1 September 2026, with issuing phased in through 2027 (impots.gouv.fr). Poland’s national system, KSeF, becomes mandatory during 2026 (podatki.gov.pl). Denmark’s Bookkeeping Act phases in digital bookkeeping systems that can send and receive e-invoices, with the last group of businesses covered from 1 July 2026 (Danish Business Authority). Check your own country’s timeline with your accountant; national rules move faster than the EU one.
What this means for a small company
Most of the work lands on invoicing software and accounting systems, not on you. Still, four things are worth doing now.
- Know where your suppliers and customers are. Sales and purchases across an EU border are the first ones covered. Keep your customers’ and suppliers’ VAT numbers correct and check them in VIES; the reporting is matched on them.
- Make sure you can receive structured invoices. Your accounting system or an access point on the Peppol network needs to accept them. Suppliers will start sending structured files alongside, and later instead of, PDFs.
- Keep every supplier invoice with its original file and its fields. Supplier, invoice number, dates, amounts and VAT are exactly the data the reporting is built on, and the original document is what an auditor asks for. US companies are outside ViDA, but the IRS record-keeping rules ask for the same documents.
- Ask your accountant about your country’s domestic mandate. If it starts before 2030, it will shape your timeline more than the EU date does.
kvitr is built for the third point: it collects supplier invoices from mailboxes, forwarded email, APIs and billing dashboards, keeps the original file and reads the supplier, number, dates and amounts from it, so the record your accountant needs exists before any deadline. It does not send or receive e-invoices; that stays with your invoicing and accounting software.