As in the rest of the European Union, Directive 2014/55/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council will be applied in Belgium in 2019 as they aim to implement eInvoicing in the public administration.
The BOSA (Federale overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning/Service public fédéral Stratégic et Appui), is the body in charge of the digital transformation and the implementation of eInvoicing in Belgium and, in 2013, it had already decided to legalise the use of eInvoicing in the country. So since 1 January 2013, e-invoices have been on an equal footing with paper invoices in Belgium.
The first region in Belgium to make eInvoicing mandatory was Flanders which back in 2016 made B2G eInvoicing mandatory. Some years later, on 1 January 2018, the Belgian government extended this mandatory use of eInvoicing to those federal entities that invoiced more than €135,000, promoting the use of eInvoicing among companies and public administrations across all of the federal country. Lastly, the plan is for eInvoicing to be extended to all public procurement in the country in 2019.
The Belgian government, when promoting the use of eInvoicing in companies and public administrations across the entire country and, in keeping with the studies conducted by the Belgian Simplified Administration Service, expected the electronic processing of a billion invoices exchanged in Belgium would generate savings of at least €3.5 million each year. This is a major cost saving which demonstrates that eInvoicing offers great benefits for the countries implementing it.
Download our Whitepaper
SERES has written a White Paper on “Electronic Invoicing in Europe” which sets out in detail the progress that is expected for eInvoicing in Europe (Albania, Germany, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine).
It is the perfect guide to understand what your company is facing if it wants to use eInvoicing globally.
