Peppol is mandatory. What if your invoices come from your own software?

Since 1 January 2026, Belgian VAT-registered businesses have had to exchange their B2B invoices in a structured format over the Peppol network. A pdf by email is no longer enough. Repeated breaches carry fines of up to €5,000.

If you work with Exact, Yuki, Teamleader or another common package, your supplier has probably solved this already. You can stop reading here.

The problem sits elsewhere, and that group is bigger than you would think: companies whose invoices do not come out of the accounting package. An order portal that produces invoices. A module someone built once. A spreadsheet with a button on it. That part does not hang off your accounting package, so it does not get solved along the way.

What is needed is manageable. You need a sending point — an access point to the network — and your invoices have to leave in a valid structured format. And you have to be able to receive them too, because the obligation runs both ways. That last part is the most commonly forgotten.

What does not change: how your invoice looks. Peppol is about the file travelling between two systems, not about what you or your customer sees. Your layout stays, your numbering stays, your payment terms stay.

The trap is in the subscriptions. Various providers charge per invoice sent or per month on top of what you already pay. At a few hundred invoices a year that adds up. Your own integration is one-off work and costs nothing per invoice afterwards.

Count on one to two weeks, most of which is waiting on registration. The real work is limited; testing with an invoice to your own accountant is what takes time — and that is exactly the step you should not skip.