What does the law actually say about e-invoicing in 2026?
There is a lot of confusion, and that is understandable. Reports about mandatory e-invoicing in Belgium, Germany and the EU are being mixed up with the Dutch situation. The facts: B2G (invoices to the government) has been mandatory in the Netherlands for years via the Peppol network, and the Dutch government processes approximately 1.6 million structured e-invoices through that channel each year. But no obligation applies in 2026 to invoices between businesses. The Ministry of Finance advisory report from March 2026 does point unambiguously towards a mandatory Peppol-based system, in line with the European EN 16931 standard. A definitive cabinet position is expected in the summer of 2026, followed by a public consultation on draft legislation in the fourth quarter of 2026. The intended phased rollout starts no earlier than 1 January 2030.
Why is your administration already feeling the impact, even without a mandate?
Practice is ahead of regulation. Businesses supplying the government or Belgian customers are already receiving requests for structured e-invoices in Peppol format. Companies trading internationally are running into ViDA developments from Brussels that also affect Dutch businesses. And internally, more and more purchasing departments no longer accept PDF invoices by email as genuinely digital. The result: you receive invoices in a mix of formats. One supplier sends a Peppol message, another a PDF by email, a third an Excel attachment. That is precisely the kind of document flow where manual work accumulates: someone opens the attachment, locates the invoice number, the amount and the VAT breakdown, and re-enters it all into the accounting package. That work already exists. It simply becomes less visible as volumes grow.
A PDF by email is not e-invoicing
This is a common assumption: sending an invoice as a PDF by email means you are already doing electronic invoicing. Technically, that is not correct. E-invoicing in the legal sense requires a structured, machine-readable format, such as UBL or Peppol BIS, so that the receiving party can import the invoice data automatically without manual intervention. A PDF is an image of an invoice, not a structured message. That distinction is exactly why the transition to genuine e-invoicing requires more than a software update: it affects the entire document flow, from how you send invoices to how you receive, validate and process them. Accounting packages such as Exact Online, AFAS Profit and Twinfield are actively working on Peppol integrations, but receiving invoices in varying formats remains an operational challenge that is separate from the sending side.
What does this mean in practice for anyone processing invoices today?
The timeline towards 2030 provides room to manoeuvre, but that room disappears quickly if you do not start in time. A few practical consequences that are already relevant. First: if you have customers or clients in Belgium or in the Dutch public sector, you must already be able to send Peppol invoices. Second: even where the obligation does not yet exist, larger buyers are increasingly expecting structured invoice data rather than a PDF. Third: the inbound side is at least as important as the outbound side. Invoices you receive in 2026 still arrive in every conceivable format. As long as they are not structured, manual work is still required to process them in your ERP or accounting package. That manual work is already the bottleneck in many finance teams, regardless of what the law requires.
When does automating invoice processing make sense?
Not every business benefits equally from automating its inbound invoice flow. If you process twenty supplier invoices per month, the payback period is long. But once you move towards a hundred or more invoices per month, every invoice is being manually re-entered into an ERP or accounting package, and invoices are arriving in varying formats from different suppliers, it becomes relevant. Document processing is what dottle does: not by giving every supplier its own template, but by reading varying formats, recognising the relevant fields and delivering them where the work happens, with a person approving before the booking is finalised. That applies today for PDF invoices, and it will apply equally to the structured invoices arriving via Peppol. The format changes; the challenge of processing and matching remains.