Since 1 January 2026, invoices between businesses established in Belgium for transactions taxable in Belgium must be structured electronic invoices — in practice Peppol BIS, compliant with the European standard EN 16931. A PDF sent by email no longer counts as the invoice. The tolerance period without penalties ended on 31 March 2026, so the mandate is now fully enforceable.
That settles domestic B2B invoices between Belgian companies. It does not settle the rest of the pile: plenty of the documents a Belgian business, or its accountant, processes every month still arrive as a PDF or a phone photo. This guide covers what the mandate requires, what it leaves out, and how to size the manual work that remains.
What the mandate requires
- Who: taxable persons established in Belgium (seat or fixed establishment), both as issuers and recipients.
- Which transactions: domestic B2B supplies taxable in Belgium.
- How: a structured invoice in an EN 16931-compliant format, exchanged over the Peppol network unless both parties agree on another compliant channel.
- Since when: 1 January 2026, with a tolerance period for businesses that took reasonable and timely steps, which ended on 31 March 2026.
Penalties
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Non-compliance is fined on a graduated scale reported by advisers: €1,500 for a first offence, €3,000 for a second and €5,000 for each subsequent one. Confirm the current rules with your accountant — this article is not tax advice.
What the mandate does not cover
| Document | Why it still arrives as PDF or photo |
|---|---|
| Invoices from foreign suppliers | Cross-border invoices are outside the Belgian domestic mandate |
| Invoices from non-established suppliers registered for VAT in Belgium | The obligation applies to businesses established in Belgium |
| Invoices for VAT-exempt supplies (article 44 of the VAT Code) | Exempt transactions are excluded — think of many rent, insurance, medical and financial services invoices |
| Receipts behind expense claims | Fuel, restaurant, parking and hotel receipts are B2C sales for the supplier |
| Delivery notes, quotes and purchase orders | They are not invoices, so the mandate never applied to them |
| Fallback invoices | When a recipient is temporarily unable to receive a structured invoice, the supplier may issue it on paper or as a PDF |
| Invoices dated before 2026 | Archives, audits and catch-up bookkeeping stay in their original format |
E-reporting is next, not now
Belgium plans to add real-time e-reporting of invoice data to the tax administration from 2028, through the Peppol "5-corner" model, replacing the annual client listing. It changes what is reported, not the documents in the categories above: a foreign supplier's invoice or a restaurant receipt will still reach you in whatever form the supplier chose.
How to size what is left
Take the last 100 documents your team processed and mark those in the table above. The share you get is the manual input the mandate did not remove. For a company with local suppliers only, it may be small. For an accounting firm (comptable / boekhouder) with SME clients, a logistics or construction business matching delivery notes, or anyone with foreign suppliers and staff expense claims, it is often the larger part.
Where WhappScan fits — and where it does not
WhappScan is not a Peppol access point and does not send or receive Peppol invoices. For in-scope domestic invoices, you need your Peppol provider or accounting software.
WhappScan handles what stays outside Peppol: it reads the invoices, receipts, delivery notes, quotes and purchase orders that arrive as a PDF or a photo, and returns their fields — supplier, VAT number, date, VAT, total, and each line where the document has them — ready for Excel or your bookkeeping. Staff and clients can send the photo by WhatsApp, with nothing to install.
Try it on your own documents: the invoice to Excel tool and the receipt to Excel tool are free, need no signup and handle up to three documents a day. For delivery notes, use the delivery note tool.
Operating in France too? See France e-invoicing since 1 September 2026.
For every country side by side, see e-invoicing mandates country by country.
Sources
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