In some member states, governments lose up to 29 percent of expected VAT revenue. Aa across the EU, tens of billions go uncollected every year. Their fix is to make every business invoice visible, structured and traceable. The network they are using to do it is called PEPPOL, and it is fast becoming a legal requirement.
PEPPOL stands for Pan-European Public Procurement On-Line. It is a network connecting businesses in over 40 countries that lets them exchange invoices electronically. Think of it as a postal system for business documents, but instant and legally recognised. When your business is registered on PEPPOL, any other registered business can find you and send an invoice straight into your accounting system. No email, no portal, no one typing data in by hand.
By 2030, every EU member state will be required to support structured electronic invoicing under the ViDA regulation (VAT in the Digital Age). PEPPOL is the network at the centre of that shift. Belgium, Germany and France are already live with mandates. Countries outside the EU — including Norway, which introduced mandatory PEPPOL for government invoicing as far back as 2012 — have seen the same logic play out: a standard network makes invoicing faster, cheaper and traceable. The EU is now applying that at scale.
In mandated markets, invoices sent outside the required channel may not be legally valid. In some countries, payment cannot be processed against a non-compliant invoice. Missing the mandate means delayed payments, potential fines and lost contracts with public-sector buyers.
It is projected that by 2030, electronic invoicing is expected to become the dominant method for exchanging business transactions across most major economies.
Billentis Market Report 2026
Companies already on PEPPOL are seeing the difference: lower AP processing costs, faster payment cycles, and invoices that move without friction. The results at country level tell the same story, Italy added 6 billion euros in annual tax revenue after mandating digital invoicing, Greece cut its VAT gap from 29 percent to 9 percent in seven years. More mandates are coming, and the window to get ahead of them is closing.
The businesses that register now are not just ticking a compliance box. They are building the infrastructure that makes every future mandate easier, every new market faster to enter, and every supplier relationship smoother. Getting on PEPPOL today means the next deadline is not a scramble, it is already handled.
Unimaze handles both sides of the mandate. Outbound, Unimaze Dispatcher is a certified PEPPOL access point, it takes invoices from your accounting system, formats them to the correct standard, and delivers them to any registered recipient on the network. When a new country goes live or a mandate changes, the compliance layer updates. Your team does not have to rebuild anything.
Inbound is where most businesses underestimate the work. When structured invoices start arriving from suppliers, someone still has to approve them, code them to the right accounts, and get them ready for payment. Unimaze automates that entire chain: invoices arrive over PEPPOL or through a supplier portal for vendors who are not yet on the network, accounting codes are assigned automatically by rule, and approvals are routed to the right people without anyone chasing email threads. Suppliers who still send PDFs are handled with Digitizer, where Unimaze extracts the data and feeds it into the same workflow as a fully structured invoice.
The result is what the Billentis report describes: lower AP processing costs, faster payment cycles, and an audit trail that holds up when regulators come looking.
