For UK accounting firms, bookkeepers and businesses with clients, suppliers or subsidiaries in Ireland or the EU. None of this replaces advice from a qualified accountant or your local tax adviser.
What’s actually changing
The UK’s own e-invoicing mandate isn’t the only one on the calendar. Ireland and several EU countries are introducing mandatory e-invoicing on their own timelines. Some of those timelines are considerably sooner than the UK’s April 2029 start date. We covered the UK mandate in detail in E-Invoicing for Accounting Firms: Why the Document Problem Doesn’t Go Away. Some of your clients may trade with, or have a presence in, Ireland, Belgium, Poland, Germany or France. For them, the relevant deadline may not be 2029 at all. For some of these countries, it’s already in force.
This post sets out the confirmed dates, country by country, and what actually changes when each one lands.
Ireland’s timeline
The Revenue Commissioners are introducing Ireland’s mandate under the VAT Modernisation programme, in three phases, as set out in Revenue’s own implementation document.
Phase 1: 1 November 2028. Large corporates must begin issuing structured e-invoices for domestic B2B transactions. They must also report a defined subset of that transaction data to Revenue. From the same date, every VAT-registered business in Ireland must be able to receive a structured e-invoice. That includes businesses well below the large-corporate threshold. The mandate doesn’t yet require them to issue one.
Phase 2: November 2029. Revenue’s August 2026 update confirms that the obligation to issue e-invoices extends to all remaining VAT-registered businesses trading intra-EU.
Phase 3: July 2030. Full alignment with the EU-wide ViDA framework, which we explain below.
Valid e-invoices must be structured XML files that comply with the European standard EN 16931. That’s the same standard behind the EU’s wider ViDA rules. Revenue has been explicit about this. It’s a change to invoicing and reporting mechanics, not to VAT rates, payment terms or liability calculations.
The countries moving before Ireland
Ireland’s first deadline is 2028. Several EU countries are already live, or go live well before then. None of these apply directly to a UK-only business. But they apply to your clients’ EU suppliers, EU subsidiaries, and any EU counterpart they invoice.
Belgium: live since 1 January 2026
Belgium was first. B2B e-invoicing has been mandatory for most domestic transactions between VAT-registered Belgian businesses since 1 January 2026. A royal decree, published in July 2025, confirms the details. The European Commission’s summary of the Belgian mandate and Loyens & Loeff’s breakdown of the decree cover it in full. Peppol is the default exchange network. Every business must be technically able to send and receive via Peppol. That holds even where both parties agree to use a different compliant method. Belgium plans to add near real-time e-reporting on top of this from 2028. That’s in line with the wider EU ViDA timeline.
Poland: phased from 1 February 2026
The European Commission’s Poland page and EY’s tax alert on the law signed in August 2025 set out how Poland’s KSeF system becomes mandatory in stages:
- Businesses with annual revenue above roughly €46 million (200 million PLN): from 1 February 2026.
- All other B2B transactions: from 1 April 2026.
- Micro-businesses with monthly sales under 10,000 PLN: from 1 January 2027.
KSeF receives every invoice as structured XML, validates it, and assigns it an ID. Only then does an invoice count as officially issued. There’s no B2C requirement.
Germany: phased from 2025 through 2028
Germany’s rollout started on the receiving side. Every business has had to be able to receive an electronic invoice since January 2025, per the European Commission’s Germany page. Issuing becomes mandatory for businesses with turnover above €800,000 from January 2027, extending to all businesses from January 2028. The legal basis is the Wachstumschancengesetz, the Growth Opportunities Act. The Bundesrat passed it in March 2024, and the Federal Ministry of Finance published further technical guidance in October 2025. Germany’s standard format is XRechnung. ZUGFeRD is a hybrid PDF-plus-XML format. Finance teams often choose it when they want a readable copy alongside the structured data.
France: from 1 September 2026
France confirmed its reform, after several delays, and it takes effect from 1 September 2026. The French government sets the calendar out directly on economie.gouv.fr and impots.gouv.fr. From that date, every business must be able to receive an e-invoice, and large and mid-sized enterprises must issue them. All remaining SMEs and micro-enterprises must issue electronic invoices from 1 September 2027, completing the transition for all French businesses.
The EU-wide framework underneath all of this
Each of the mandates above is a national one. Each runs on its own legal basis and its own timeline. Underneath them sits a single EU framework: VAT in the Digital Age, or ViDA. The EU adopted it on 11 March 2025. From 1 July 2030, structured e-invoicing to the EN 16931 standard becomes the default approach. It’s mandatory for any transaction within the EU’s Digital Reporting Requirements. That’s the point where the various national systems are supposed to converge into one interoperable approach. ViDA aims to close the EU’s VAT gap and reduce cross-border VAT fraud. It does that by giving tax authorities structured, near real-time transaction data instead of periodic returns.
1 July 2030 is also Ireland’s own Phase 3 date. It’s roughly where Belgium’s e-reporting plans and Germany’s full rollout land too. The national mandates above are, in effect, early or accelerated moves toward that same EU-wide baseline, not separate, unrelated reforms.
How Peppol’s four-corner model actually works
Belgium’s mandate, and the UK’s own confirmed approach, both build on Peppol. It’s worth being clear on what that actually means mechanically, rather than treating it as a buzzword. OpenPeppol, the not-for-profit that governs the network, documents Peppol’s four-corner model.
Corner 1 is the seller’s own accounting or ERP system. Corner 2 is the seller’s Peppol Access Point, a certified service provider. It converts the invoice into the correct structured format and signs it. That Access Point sends it across the Peppol network to Corner 3, the buyer’s own Access Point. Corner 3 delivers it to Corner 4: the buyer’s accounting system, which receives and books it.
The seller and buyer never talk to each other directly. Each only communicates with their own Access Point. Think of it like talking to your own phone provider rather than directly to whoever you’re calling. The invoice itself isn’t a PDF attached to an email. It’s structured, machine-readable data that moves straight from one accounting system to another.
What this means if you have Irish or EU clients or suppliers
None of the above changes anything for a UK-only business dealing only with UK suppliers and customers. It matters the moment a client, or a client’s supplier, sits on one side of these mandates:
- A UK firm invoicing a Belgian, Polish, French or German customer may start receiving requests to issue Peppol-compliant invoices. The UK’s own mandate doesn’t require that yet.
- A client with an Irish subsidiary needs that subsidiary ready to receive structured e-invoices by November 2028. If it’s a large corporate, it must issue them too.
- Clients buying from EU suppliers will start receiving structured e-invoices instead of PDFs, on each supplier’s own country timeline. That means Belgian suppliers already, Polish and French suppliers from 2026, and German suppliers on a phased basis through 2028.
The practical effect, for most firms, isn’t a single cutover date. It’s a slow drip of individual suppliers and customers switching over, one at a time, on their own country’s schedule. That drip started now and will continue for years.
What to do now vs later
There’s no filing or system change most UK-based firms need to make today because of Ireland or EU mandates specifically. None of these dates require action from a UK business with no Irish or EU registration. What’s worth doing now:
- Ask clients with EU subsidiaries or Irish operations whether those entities have started planning for their local deadline. Belgium and Poland are already live. Any client with a Belgian or Polish subsidiary should already have this in hand.
- Expect a mix of document types from EU suppliers for the next several years. Some will already be sending Peppol-format structured invoices, and most will still be sending PDFs. That mix will keep shifting rather than switching all at once.
- Keep an eye on the UK’s own roadmap, due at the Autumn Budget 2026. We cover it in our companion piece on the UK mandate. That roadmap should clarify how UK businesses trading with the EU need to handle invoices that arrive in Peppol format.
How Datamolino fits
Datamolino doesn’t connect directly to the Peppol network today. None of the explanation above implies otherwise. It handles the document mix this creates: PDF invoices, receipts, email attachments and HTML receipts from EU suppliers. It also handles whatever other formats a client’s international suppliers send. Datamolino captures those with line-item detail rather than just a header total. It codes them using deterministic rule-based coding. Then it exports them to Xero, QuickBooks Online or FreeAgent, through the same review queue regardless of origin.
It’s the same document-mix problem we wrote about in our UK mandate post. Irish and EU deadlines add more suppliers to that mix, on more schedules. They don’t replace the mix with one clean structured format any time soon.