Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 and EN 16931

EN 16931 and Peppol BIS Billing 3.0

EN 16931 is the European standard that defines the semantic model of an electronic invoice, that is, which data the invoice carries and what they mean, independently of the format. Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is a specific “business interoperability specification” (a specification of how systems exchange documents) that implements EN 16931 in the UBL 2.1 syntax (the XML format of the e-invoice) and adds rules for transport in the Peppol network. Put simply: EN 16931 says what, BIS 3.0 says exactly how.

Why it is not a “PDF with XML”

The aim is for the recipient’s software to process the invoice without a human retyping it. That is why the key fields are mandatory and have a precise data type and format. A PDF is for people; BIS 3.0 XML is for machines (and a nice PDF for reading can be generated from it at any time).

Structure and code lists

The standard labels fields with BT- codes (business term) and groups of fields with BG- codes (business group). In UBL XML every field has a fixed place and the values of several fields are taken from code lists: document type (380 invoice, 381 credit note), VAT category (S, Z, E, AE, K, O), currency according to ISO 4217, units of measure according to UN/ECE Rec. 20 and payment means (for example 30 credit transfer). Slovak entities are addressed in the network with the scheme 0245 (BT-34 and BT-49).

Which data an invoice must contain under the VAT act and how they map to the BT fields is discussed in the article e-invoice requirements. Ready-made documents for common Slovak situations are among the validated UBL XML samples.

Validation

Compliance is checked with automated control rules (so-called Schematron) of the EN 16931 standard and Peppol BIS Billing 3.0. An invoice that breaks a mandatory rule does not get into the network, so it pays to validate before sending, for free for example in our validator. How to avoid typical errors is summarised in the article on the most common errors.

What it means for you

In practice these fields are filled in by your invoicing software or your provider; you do not have to know the codes by heart. What matters is that you have correct details of the other party (above all its Peppol ID) and that your tool generates valid BIS 3.0. With us, receiving such invoices without the archive is free (up to 1,000 a month), with the Data archive from €2 per month per IČO.