Denmark - 2018 eInvoicing Country Sheet

Legislation

The Consolidated Law on Public Payments states that all natural and legal persons must provide a bank account ("Nemkonto") into which the public authorities can make the payment. No other way of payment is foreseen by the Act.

Furthermore, the Order on electronic settlement with public authorities, Order No. 206 of 11.03.2011 includes general provisions, such as information on invoices from public entities to natural or legal persons, invoices for public entities, use of infrastructure, etc. The legislation stipulated the mandatory standard for eInvoicing in public procurement in Denmark – OIOUBL. It is provided and maintained by the Danish Business Authority.

The legislation also stipulated that public entities should use the OIO Reliable Asynchronous Secure Profile (OIORASP) which is a profile of web service standards. It makes it possible to exchange business documents (such as eInvoices) through the Internet with a high degree of security and reliability in the transactions. 

eInvoicing platform and eInvoicing management solutions

The Danish government mandates the use of the NemHandel platform for exchanging eInvoices in B2G public procurement. NemHandel is a publicly developed and operated national infrastructure that enables companies to submit electronic invoices securely over the Internet. eInvoices that adhere to the OIOUBL standard and use the web services as specified in OIORASP are transmitted through NemHandel.

Economic operators can use any solution connected to NemHandel to submit eInvoices. In the IBIZ.center portal a catalogue of eInvoicing solution providers is available that provides solutions compatible with the Danish standards.

There are more than 100 different solutions on the market targeting different users groups and company sizes, commonly used ones are Microsoft Dynamics, Fujitsu and SAP. In addition, there are over 30 solution providers, both big and small. Among them are IBM, CSC, Tradeshift, Truelink, Visma and Pagero. 

Approach for receiving and processing eInvoices

Denmark mandates the use of upcoming European standard on eInvoicing (OIOUBL), the transmission of eInvoices through web services (compliant with OIORASP) and the use of the Danish national infrastructure (NemHandel). Only receivers of eInvoices should be registered in the NemHandelRegistry (NHR), and, therefore, have an eInvoice recipient number (EAN number). All public entities have at least one eInvoice recipient number that is publicly available in the organisation’s website.

Economic operators can submit eInvoices using three main tools:

• Fully integrated eInvoice-enabled Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions (software or web-based);
• ERP solutions in combination with an open-source software provided by the Danish Business Authority, the NemHandel message handler client;
• Manually created in the web-based invoicing portals (webform),

Public entities can either establish their own access point and eInvoicing solution connecting to common public service oriented infrastructure (OIORASP) or have an agreement with a Value Added Network Services (VANS) network provider. VANS are communication networks for exchanging electronic documents such as eInvoices. A VANS network must have an agreement on the exchange of data based on eInvoice recipient number with other network providers.

Overall, the Danish system is similar to PEPPOL. It is based on the same architectural principles, with a four corner model, technical infrastructure agreements for the solution providers to sign and almost identical open standards for payload. Danish economic operators using the NemHandel network are able to reach users on the PEPPOL network.

In addition, the Danish Business Authority supplies IT-vendors with guidelines, validation tools, presentation style-sheets and open source components to ease implementation of eInvoicing. It is the implementers' (IT-vendors') responsibility to adhere to the standards and develop software solutions for the different users' needs in the market.

Status on the implementation of the European Standard on eInvoicing (EN)

The Danish Business Authority is in dialogue with the economic operators and eInvoicing solutions providers to make sure that they adhere to the European norms, once they are ready. They can do so either by conversion services or by adapting to the European standard on eInvoicing.

It is currently also preparing a specific plan for the implementation of the Directive 2014/55/EU as well as for the implementation of the European standard on eInvoicing, currently as a bill in the Danish parliament. This plan includes, among other actions, documentation for the Danish Core Invoice Usage Specification (CIUS), syntax-mapping and the development of the Danish SMP (Regulation of competition in the telecommunications market).

Additional information

The Danish Business Authority is working on extending the implementation and support for PEPPOL in Denmark. The NemHandelRegistry (NHR) is now extended with PEPPOL eDelivery support (Service Metadata Service SMP) integrated with the European Service Metadata Locater (SML) register. This initiative will make it easier for the growing number of PEPPOL enabled eInvoicing service providers and end-users to adopt PEPPOL services in Denmark.

VALIDATED BY THE EMSFEI MEMBER

Last updated:  Dec 20, 2019 17:05