Introduction

If you’ve been issuing and receiving paper or PDF invoices for years, you may have started hearing about e-invoicing — perhaps from a tax advisor, a customer who now requires it, or a government deadline you’ve seen in the news. You may be wondering what it is, whether it applies to you, and how to start.

This documentation will help you understand what e-invoicing is, why it’s becoming mandatory across more countries every year, and how Staple gives you a single, simple way to comply — wherever your business operates.

A global shift is underway

For decades, businesses have exchanged invoices as paper documents or as PDFs sent over email. These formats work for humans but not for machines — every recipient has to read, interpret, and re-enter the information into their own accounting system. This creates manual work, errors, delays in payment, and gaps in tax reporting that governments cannot close.

To address this, tax authorities around the world are mandating a shift to e-invoicing: machine-readable invoices that flow directly between businesses and through government systems. Italy was an early adopter in 2019. Poland, France, Germany, Malaysia, India, and others are now either mandating or phasing in similar requirements. The trend is consistent — within the next few years, most major economies will require e-invoicing for B2B transactions.

The drivers behind this shift are:

• Closing the VAT gap. Tax authorities estimate that hundreds of billions of euros in VAT go uncollected each year due to fraud, errors, and unreported transactions. Structured e-invoices, reported in real time, make these gaps much harder to hide.
• Reducing manual work. When invoices arrive in a structured format, the recipient’s accounting system can process them automatically — no re-keying, no PDF parsing, no email forwarding.
• Faster payments and better cash flow. Automated processing means invoices are validated, approved, and paid faster.
• Cross-border interoperability. Networks like Peppol allow businesses in different countries to exchange invoices using a common standard.

So what exactly is an e-invoice?

An e-invoice is a structured digital document that represents a commercial invoice in a format defined by a tax authority or a standardisation body. It is not a scanned PDF, an email attachment, or a Word document. It is data — typically XML or JSON — conforming to a published schema.

Every country defines its own e-invoice format. Italy uses FatturaPA delivered through the SDI platform. Germany uses XRechnung delivered via Peppol. Poland uses FA_VAT delivered through KSeF. Malaysia uses MyInvois UBL 2.1 delivered to LHDN. France will use Factur-X delivered through the Plateforme Agréée network. The list goes on.

In addition to format differences, every country has its own:

• Mandatory and optional fields
• Validation rules (tax codes, identifiers, calculation logic)
• Delivery protocol (direct API to tax authority, Peppol, or a national network)
• Onboarding requirements (Peppol Participant ID, certificates, mandates)
• Lifecycle expectations (acceptance, rejection, payment reporting)

This fragmentation is the central challenge for any business operating in more than one country.

How is an e-invoice different from what you send today?

A regular invoice — whether printed on paper or sent as a PDF — is designed for a human to read. The information is laid out visually, but a computer cannot reliably extract the data without OCR or manual entry.

An e-invoice is designed for a machine to read. The same information — supplier, customer, line items, taxes, totals — is encoded in a structured data format (XML or JSON) that follows a strict schema defined by the relevant tax authority or standards body. The invoice can still be rendered visually for a human, but the structured data is the source of truth.

One integration, every country — that’s where Staple comes in

Staple supports e-invoicing across 12 countries: 🇸🇬 Singapore · 🇨🇳 China · 🇲🇾 Malaysia · 🇵🇱 Poland · 🇫🇷 France · 🇧🇪 Belgium · 🇮🇹 Italy · 🇩🇪 Germany · 🇪🇸 Spain · 🇧🇷 Brazil · 🇲🇽 Mexico · 🇮🇳 India.

Customers integrate with Staple once, and Staple takes care of every country-specific detail behind the scenes — format conversion, validation against tax authority rules, transport to the right destination, and lifecycle synchronisation.

Staple supports both directions of the invoice flow:

Issuing invoices — Accounts Receivable

When your business needs to send an invoice to a customer, your accounting or ERP system submits the invoice data to Staple in a single unified format. Staple then:

• Converts the data to the destination country’s e-invoice format
• Validates it internally and against the relevant tax authority’s rules
• Submits it to the tax authority portal or the Peppol network on your behalf
• Reports the outcome back to you

Your system only ever produces one format, regardless of which country the invoice is destined for.

Receiving invoices — Accounts Payable

When a supplier issues an e-invoice to your business, the invoice flows through a tax authority or the Peppol network to Staple. Staple then:

• Receives the invoice on your behalf
• Stores it and makes it available to your system through the export endpoint
• Lets your buyer-side team accept, reject, or mark the invoice as paid through Staple’s API
• Synchronises each status change back to the tax authority or the Peppol network

The original e-invoice file (XML, UBL, etc.) is also available for download whenever you need it — for audit, dispute resolution, or archival.

Where to go next

• Onboarding — Before you can send or receive e-invoices, your business needs to be registered with the relevant tax authority or network. See the Onboarding section for country-specific preparation guides.
• Accounts Payable — How to receive e-invoices and manage their lifecycle.
• Accounts Receivable — How to issue e-invoices through Staple.
• Schema Objects — The full data model used for issuing e-invoices through Staple.