The Three Pillars: a European Standard, CEN and CEF eInvoicing

The European Standard Organisation (CEN) is currently defining a European Standard for electronic invoicing. It has appointed a dedicated Committee (CEN TC434) to conceptualise and design the standard. 

What's the story?

In April 2014, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Directive 2014/55/EU on electronic invoicing in public procurement. The Directive aims at facilitating the use of electronic invoices by economic operators when supplying goods, works and services to the public administration.

The Directive sets out the legal framework for the broad use and definition of a European standard (EN) for e-invoicing. The conception and design of the standard is carried out by the European Standardisation Committee (CEN).

Starting in November 2018, all contracting authorities and contracting entities will be mandated to receive and process e-Invoices complying with the European standard and with any of  the syntaxes that will be published together with the standard. Member States can grant an extra year to their local authorities to comply with the standard.

The standard is composed of a semantic data model of the core elements of an electronic invoice, and beyond the sematic data model, there will be a syntaxes component plus additional standardisation deliverables which are all aimed to enhance interoperability.

What's happening now?

The Member States have submitted more than 600 comments on the sematic data model during an inquiry launched by CEN on e-invoicing (December 2015-March 2016).

The CEN Technical Committee on Electronic Invoicing (CEN TC 434) is currently consolidating the results.

In parallel, the work on syntaxes is taking place: CEN TC 434 has a mandate from the standardisation request to review and assess a number of syntaxes against a set of criteria defined in the   standardisation request itself, which includes the UN/CEFACT Cross Industry Invoice (CII) XML, the OASIS UBL 2.1 Invoice, the Financial Invoice based on the ISO 20022 methodology and other formats used in industry (e.g. EDIFACT).

The Technical Committee will transmit the results of the ongoing work on the semantic data model, syntaxes and ancillary deliverables to CEN in Q3 2016.

What's next?

For 2016, the European Commission has made available an indicative budget of EUR 7 million for CEF eInvoicing under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), through grants. The grants seek to improve the interoperability and interconnectivity of the European digital service ecosystem. The CEF eInvoicing Call for Proposals will open from 13 September until 15 December 2016.

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The European Standard on electronic invoicing will be the cornerstone of the e-invoicing policy, at national and European level for the coming years. This is your chance to have your say on the current developments. Let's define our future and connect Europe, together!

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