Denmark

Legislation

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 administrations to natural or legal persons, invoices for public administrations, 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 Agency for Digitisation.

The legislation also stipulated that public administrations 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. Denmark makes available in the IBIZ.center portal a catalogue of eInvoicing solution providers 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 eInvoicing standards (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 administrations 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 Agency for Digitisation, the NemHandel message handler client;
• Manually created in the web-based invoicing portals (webform),

Public administrations can either set-up 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 Agency for Digitisation 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.

Additional information

The Danish Agency for Digitisation 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 conversions services or by adapting to the European standard.

Update information

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Last updated:  Jun 29, 2017 10:30