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Peppol, e-invoicing and the Belgian mandate

What e-invoicing means for you if you supply Belgian businesses — and why you arrange it in your own bookkeeping package.

Do you supply business customers in Belgium? Then this article is for you. If you mainly sell to consumers in the Netherlands, nothing changes and you can move on.

What is Peppol?

Peppol is the European network that carries e-invoices between businesses and governments. UBL is the file format such an invoice comes in — a structured file your customer’s computer can read automatically, instead of a PDF that a human has to look at.

Both are features of sending an invoice. And sending is your bookkeeping package’s job, not ours.

The Belgian mandate

From 1 January 2026, structured electronic invoicing is mandatory for B2B transactions between VAT-registered businesses established in Belgium. The Peppol network with the Peppol BIS format is the standard for it.

For a Dutch maker with Belgian business customers that means:

  • A PDF by email is no longer enough for those invoices. A structured file has to go over the network.
  • You arrange that in your bookkeeping package, not with us. You need a Peppol access point — Moneybird and e-Boekhouden offer one, themselves or through a partner — and your customer has to be findable as a Peppol recipient.
  • Consumers fall outside the mandate. So for most neon orders — private customers — nothing changes.

This is a guide, not tax advice. What applies to you depends on where you are established, your VAT status and your customer type. Ask your accountant about your own situation; e-invoicing rules shift from year to year.

What does this mean for the connection with us?

Nothing. And that is exactly the point.

Our draft invoice is an ordinary sales invoice in your administration. Anything your package can do with a manually entered invoice, it can do with ours:

  • Moneybird can send sales invoices as UBL/e-invoice, including over Peppol to government bodies.
  • e-Boekhouden splits the roles the same way: the invoice sits in the administration, you choose the channel it goes out on.

If you have to move to Peppol tomorrow, you switch that on in your bookkeeping package. Nothing is needed at our end, and nothing changes about the Create draft invoice button.

Why we built it this way

We could have sent invoices ourselves. We deliberately did not:

  • Your invoice numbers have to come from one system — otherwise you get gaps or duplicates in the series.
  • The retention obligation and the sending chain already exist in your package. Building them twice only creates a second place where things break.
  • E-invoicing rules change per country and per year. Your bookkeeping package tracks that as its core business; we would always be behind.

In short: we make sure the lines are right in your administration. Your package makes sure the invoice goes out the right way.

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