If you send or receive invoices in Europe, the rules changed under you. In several countries you can no longer send a PDF and call it done, and in almost every country in the EU you must now be able to receive a structured electronic invoice. This is a country-by-country map, with what actually lands in your inbox and what to do about it.
Germany led with the receive obligation (January 2025). Formats in play: ZUGFeRD (a PDF with an embedded XML file), XRechnung (pure XML, standard for public contracts) and UBL/Peppol. If you are a freelancer with business customers, you must be able to accept these files,, and a plain scan of a paper invoice is no longer enough on its own.
Practical note: roughly every second invoice in our own test corpus already carried embedded XML that nobody used. The data was there, in the file.
France uses a Y-model: invoices flow through accredited platforms, with a central directory. Factur-X (France's name for ZUGFeRD) is the common format. If you invoice French clients, expect structured invoices to become the norm quickly.
Decentralised Peppol model, no central platform. Penalties apply for non-compliance.
Poland runs a clearance system called KSeF, with its own format FA(3),, not UBL. Invoices must be registered and receive a number before delivery.
FatturaPA through the SDI platform. Also clearance, also a national format. If you work with Italian companies, they will hand you XML, not a PDF.
Croatia introduced its Fiskalizacija 2.0 regime in January 2026; Greece runs myDATA real-time reporting. Both are clearance-style: reporting happens close to the moment of issue.
Peppol is the common thread. B2G (invoices to public bodies) has been mandatory for years in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg; B2B obligations follow through 2030 under the EU's ViDA programme.
Saudi Arabia (ZATCA) puts a QR code on every invoice, reading the code is enough to get the key data. India uses a clearance model where the government issues a signed QR; the data is already structured for the recipient. Turkey, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and most of Latin America operate clearance regimes with their own national formats.
You do not need to become an e-invoicing expert. You need three things:
Most well-known services read invoices by recognising the page, they treat every invoice as a picture and apply a model. That works, but it lands in the 90s: the model has to guess between net, tax, discount and total.
A different approach is to check what is inside the file first: embedded XML, a QR code, a text layer, and only recognise the image when there is nothing else. On our own measurements, electronic invoices come out without recognition errors because they are read, not guessed, and images are handled with arithmetic checks (totals recomputed, IBAN validated, tax number format verified).
Written 5 October 2026. Obligation dates are from public government sources; formats and deadlines change, so verify against the national authority before making decisions.