E-invoicing and Peppol, in plain words.
An e-invoice is an invoice as structured data the recipient reads straight in. Peppol is the way it gets there. This page says what that means for your business.
What an e-invoice is
An e-invoice is not a PDF attached to an email. It is a file with fixed fields: invoice number, period of performance, line items, tax rate, bank details. The recipient’s software reads those fields in, and nobody types anything up. In Austria the format is called ebInterface. Beside it there is the European standard EN 16931, which describes the same fields.
What Peppol is
Peppol is a network that carries e-invoices from one business to another. It works much like email, only with a fixed address and a delivery receipt. Every participant has a Peppol ID. An access point takes your invoice and delivers it to the recipient. You do not need a connection of your own.
The way an invoice travels
- Your businessthe invoice as structured data
- Peppolthrough an access point
- Recipientreads the invoice straight in
Who is already affected
Public clients are already there: the federal government has accepted invoices only electronically for years, through e-Rechnung.gv.at. States and municipalities at least have to accept e-invoices. Anyone who builds for the public sector knows this, even on small jobs.
Between businesses, e-invoicing is not yet mandatory in Austria. The direction is clear, though: Germany has passed its mandate, the EU is following with common rules, and more and more developers and general contractors ask for e-invoices of their own accord. We will name a date when the law names one.
What IONVO makes of it
IONVO creates every invoice as structured data from the start. The PDF is only a view of it. From that data IONVO writes the file as ebInterface or to EN 16931 and sends it through a Peppol access point to the recipient. For the federal government it goes to e-Rechnung.gv.at, with the order reference without which an invoice is rejected there.
Recipients without Peppol get a PDF with the same data embedded. A person reads the PDF, a program reads the data. Before sending, IONVO checks that every mandatory detail under § 11 UStG is present and whether the tax liability passes to the recipient under § 19 UStG.
Frequently asked questions
Your next invoice can already be an e-invoice.
Sign up. During the beta we set up the sending together with you.