Informatii generale

European legislation on eInvoicing

The European Parliament and Council voted the Directive 2014/55/EU on electronic invoicing in public procurement on 16 April 2014.

This Directive calls for the definition of a common European standard on electronic invoicing (EN 16931) at the semantic level, and additional standardisation deliverables which will enhance interoperability at the syntax level.

Directive 2014/55 dictates that the Member States shall adopt it so that it will become mandatory for all public contracting authorities and contracting entities to receive and process eInvoices complying with the European standard.

Public contracting authorities and entities are defined in directive 2014/55 (article 2) through a reference to directive 2014/24 as:

The State, regional or local authorities, bodies governed by public law or associations formed by one or more such authorities or one or more such bodies governed by public law; where, ‘bodies governed by public law’ means bodies that have all of the following characteristics:

• they are established for the specific purpose of meeting needs in the general interest, not having an industrial or commercial character;
• they have legal personality; and
• they are financed, for the most part, by the State, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law; or are subject to management supervision by those authorities or bodies; or have an administrative, managerial or supervisory board, more than half of whose members are appointed by the State, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law;

The Directive does not prevent the Member States from extending the scope in their national transposition.

Compliance with eInvoicing Directive

Article 7 of Directive 2014/55 on electronic invoicing in public procurement states that:

"Member States shall ensure that contracting authorities and contracting entities receive and process electronic invoices which comply with the European standard on electronic invoicing whose reference has been published pursuant to Article 3(2) and with any of the syntaxes on the list published pursuant to Article 3(2)."

Compliance with the European standard on e-Invoicing

Explaining the standard

A key objective of the European standard on eInvoicing (EN) is to make it possible for sellers to send invoices to many customers by using a single eInvoicing format and thus not having to adjust their sending and/or receiving to connect with individual trading parties. To achieve this, the European standard on eInvoicing defines the core business terms (elements) of an electronic invoice in a semantic data model. The definition of the core semantic data model is documented in part 1 of the European standard which includes a list of all business terms that may be used in a compliant invoice, and defines how they shall be understood and used. The core invoice includes common business terms and business rules that enable trading partners to exchange structured electronic invoices in general trade circumstances. The eInvoicing standard defines the semantics of the core invoice data model. The semantic model can then be bound to a message syntax to create structured messages that can be exchanged and automatically processed.

EN 16931 compliance

Three levels of compliance

Section 4.4 of part 1 of the eInvoicing standard specifies the compliance criteria in detail but below is a short introduction.

The European eInvoicing standard defines compliance at three levels and states that each party must comply with all levels. This means that a compliant party must have implemented support for invoices that fulfil the requirements of a compliant invoice specification.

The invoice document

The electronic invoice document that is created and sent must comply with all the rules that are defined for the CORE invoice or the CIUS specification that it is based on.

This includes that it:

• shall contain all mandatory information.
• relevant information must be structured as specified.
• amounts must be calculated as specified.
• elements shall only contain allowed values, such as codes.