Estonia - 2018 eInvoicing Country Sheet

Legislation

The amendment of the Accounting Act, which was published on 27 December 2016, states that all contracting authorities (central, regional and local) shall accept and process machine-processable invoices as of 1 March 2017.

In addition, this act mandates the use of specific formats, either the Estonian standard (national XML-based standard) or the European standard on eInvoicing, for any eInvoice issued to a contracting authority as of 1 July 2017.

eInvoicing platform and management solutions

Estonia’s approach to processing eInvoices is decentralized whereby contracting authorities within the public sector receive eInvoices individually and not via a central platform. Consequently, several private service providers offer eInvoicing exchange services. Estonia’s private sector  eInvoicing service providers are: Omniva AS, Telema AS,  Fitek (ex-Opus Capita),  Edisoft and Amphora. In Estonia, there is also one operator that is owned by Centre of Registers and Information Systems (RIK): e-Financials.

All of them are linked by means of mutual agreements (the so-called roaming agreements), which allow for eInvoices to be sent from an accounting software of one operator to the software of the other operator.

The Estonian government does not mandate nor recommend any eInvoicing service providers and economic operators are free to choose their eInvoicing solutions. 

Approach for receiving and processing

Economic operators must have an accounting software or ERP[1] in place in order to generate eInvoices or can alternatively outsource the generation of eInvoices to different software providers.

The eInvoicing service providers mentioned above also provide eInvoicing management services including the creation of eInvoices. Economic operators are free to contract other private or public software providers such as Merit Tarkvara or the Centre of Registers and Information Systems (RIK).

RIK, a state agency working under the Estonian Ministry of Justice, offers an automated accounting software (e-Financials), helping entrepreneurs organise their accounting and allowing them to generate eInvoices. Unlike all service providers, RIK only charges for its services after one year, allowing the economic operators to use its e-Financials software free of charge during the first year. The Ministry of Finance and RIK agreed on the use of the e-Financials software free of charge from 2017- 2018.

In all cases, the service and software providers are mandated to use a national standard based on XML, the EVS 923:2014/AC:2017, to exchange eInvoices. The European standard on eInvoicing will be mandated as well, according to the deadline stipulated in the Directive.

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

The Ministry of Finance will try to introduce mandatory B2G eInvoicing in 2018. Current national legislation only needs a change in one provision to make B2G mandatory. At the moment businesses can send eInvoices accordingly to the Estonian national standard and after the deadline stated in the Directive 2014/55/EU, the European standard will be mandatory.

Additional information

According to a 2014 study conducted by the Estonian Ministry of Finance, the Estonian government would save around EUR 2.5 million annually once eInvoicing is fully operational.

More info available at the Ministry of Finance website.

[1] Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a system of software, which is designed to manage all the information and activities of a company by using shared data (Definition: Cambridge Business English Dictionary).

VALIDATED BY THE EMSFEI MEMBER

Last updated:  Dec 20, 2019 17:06