ediverse

Type to search across standards, messages, tools and glossary.

ediverse Explore the platform

Spotlight PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 The EU e-invoicing mandate is here — France Sept 2026, Belgium Jan 2026, Germany 2025.

— 01

Foundations

— 02

Standards

— 03

Flagship messages

— 04

Tools

PEPPOL-BIS-3

PEPPOL Business Interoperability Specification for Billing 3.0. The de facto European implementation of EN 16931 on UBL 2.1, profiled for the PEPPOL network.

Definition

PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 is a Business Interoperability Specification published by OpenPEPPOL. A BIS is an implementation profile that constrains a generic standard to make it interoperable end-to-end on PEPPOL. The Billing 3.0 BIS:

  • References the EN 16931-1:2017 semantic model.
  • Adopts the UBL 2.1 Invoice and UBL 2.1 CreditNote syntax.
  • Restricts possible values via Schematron business rules (PEPPOL-EN16931-UBL.sch, PEPPOL-COMMON.sch).
  • Defines a process identifier urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:01:1.0 and a specific document identifier.
  • Requires the EN 16931 UNCL codes for VAT categories, units of measure, allowance reasons.
  • Imposes transport via AS2 or AS4, Access Point to Access Point.

Origin

PEPPOL was born in the European project PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online), 2008-2012, co-funded by the European Commission. At project end, the OpenPEPPOL AISBL association (international not-for-profit) was created in 2012 in Brussels to maintain and evolve the specifications. The Billing 3.0 BIS was published in January 2019 to align with EN 16931. It is today the most-deployed European implementation of EN 16931 and the mandatory target for public procurement in a majority of countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Singapore for InvoiceNow, etc.).

Example in context

A French supplier invoices an administration in another EU country. On the syntax side: it produces a UBL Invoice profiled as PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0, containing the EN 16931 BT-XX elements. On the transport side: its Access Point sends the message via AS4 to the receiver's Access Point, identified by SML/SMP lookup on the buyer's PEPPOL ID (in France, 0009:SIRET). The receiver validates via PEPPOL-EN16931-UBL.sch and acknowledges via the Message Level Response.

  • EN 16931 — the underlying semantic model.
  • AS4 — the modern PEPPOL transport.
  • Schematron — the business-rule validation tool.
  • CIUS — the PEPPOL BIS is a CIUS of EN 16931.

Last updated: May 14, 2026