Belgium switched e-invoicing on in January. Most Dutch movers are still outside it.

Since 1 January 2026, every VAT taxpayer established in Belgium has to send and receive structured e-invoices for domestic B2B. No phasing by size. Small businesses under the EUR 25,000 franchise are in scope. The grace period on penalties ended in April 2026. In practice, a Belgian customer's input VAT deduction now depends on holding a structured invoice, which means your Belgian trade partners have a direct financial reason to chase you about this.

Poland turned on KSeF in February 2026. France went live on 1 September 2026. Italy has been running on SdI since 2019. This is a wave, and it has a cause: a change to the VAT Directive in April 2025 means a Member State no longer needs a Council derogation to mandate domestic e-invoicing. The gate opened, and half a dozen countries walked through it.

So the practical question for a mover is narrow. Which of these bind you, and what do you actually have to do about it.

An e-invoice is not a PDF

An e-invoice is structured data that a computer reads without anyone retyping it. A PDF is a picture of an invoice. Emailing a PDF is not e-invoicing, it does not satisfy any of the mandates below, and it will not satisfy the EU-wide rules that arrive in 2030.

That distinction is the whole thing. If your current process is "generate a PDF, attach it to an email", then in a mandate country you do not have a partial solution. You have none.

One older rule causes confusion and is worth clearing: Directive 2014/55/EU, the one people cite from 2014, is public-sector only, and it obliges public buyers to be able to receive. It never obliged a supplier to send. It is not the reason any of this is happening now.

Where each country stands

Two notes on that table. The Dutch position changed on 11 September 2026 and the EU's own country factsheet has not caught up, so you will still find pages saying the Netherlands has no plans. No network has been mandated here yet either, so do not let anyone tell you Peppol is already a Dutch legal requirement.

Poland deserves its own warning. If you are obliged to use KSeF and you issue outside it, the document is not an invoice for VAT purposes at all. That is a harder failure mode than a fine.

For Australia and New Zealand, the ATO is explicit that e-invoicing is not a compliance measure and does not apply to business-to-consumer transactions. Household moves sit entirely outside it. The reason to adopt it there is payment speed: Commonwealth agencies pay e-invoices in 5 days against 20 otherwise.

The establishment test, which is the part worth ten minutes

Most movers who panic about this do not need to.

The issuing mandates follow establishment, not VAT registration. A Dutch mover with no fixed establishment in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy or Poland falls outside those countries' issuing mandates, even while holding local VAT numbers in some of them. Holding a foreign VAT number does not pull you in.

What pulls you in is a fixed establishment: a depot, staff on the ground, a participating presence. And a fixed establishment can exist without a branch or a subsidiary on paper, which is exactly where international movers get caught. If you keep a warehouse in Antwerp and people who work out of it, assume you are established there and get it checked properly.

France is the exception that catches foreigners. Without an establishment you have no French e-invoicing duty, but you do have a French e-reporting duty and you must appoint an approved platform wherever you owe French VAT. The free state portal was descoped, so there is no government fallback to sit on. Penalties are EUR 50 per invoice, capped at EUR 15,000 a year. One saving grace: if your French customer is VAT-registered, reverse charge applies and the customer reports.

Which leads to the other half of a mover's invoice book. Billing a foreign agent is B2B and usually reverse charge: no VAT, the customer's VAT number on the invoice, "btw verlegd" if you are Dutch, and the transaction on your ICP listing. Private customers are a different rule set, and the mandates largely exclude B2C anyway. The household move that scares you is mostly out of scope. The agent invoice is the one to look at.

Nobody is certified, including us

There is no EN 16931 certification scheme anywhere in the EU. It does not exist. Nobody can be certified compliant, and any vendor who says they are is either careless or hoping you will not check.

The claims that are actually defensible are narrow: that a product supports EN 16931, that it produces Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, that its output is validated against the official Schematron artefacts, or that it sends through a named Peppol certified service provider. Peppol accreditation attaches to network operators. It never attaches to an accounting product, and a product cannot inherit it.

Ask a vendor which of those four they mean. The answer tells you a lot.

While you are checking: nobody issues you a "Peppol ID" either. Your identifier is a number you already hold with a scheme prefix in front of it. 0106 for a Dutch KvK number, 0208 for a Belgian enterprise number, 9944 for a Dutch VAT number, 9930 for a German one, 0009 for a French SIRET, 0151 for an Australian ABN. Your service provider registers it for you. You can only be registered with one provider at a time, and if you switch providers you keep the identifier.

What a mover actually does about it

There are three realistic routes for an SME, and building your own is not one of them.

An accounting package with e-invoicing built in. A service provider or access point. Or an accountant who does it on your behalf.

Whichever you pick, the liability does not move. Article 220 of the VAT Directive puts the duty on the taxable person to ensure an invoice is issued, whether by himself, his customer, or a third party in his name. Your software does not carry that. Neither does your accountant. You do.

Where Moveezi is on this today

Plainly, so you can plan around it.

Moveezi generates customer invoices as PDFs and emails them. From any invoice you can download a structured XML file in UBL 2.1 or CII, so your finance team or accountant has a machine-readable version. Moveezi determines EU VAT per line, including reverse charge and exemptions, based on rules you configure. Moveezi syncs invoices, credit notes, payments and bills with Xero, and pushes invoices to Exact Online, where your existing accounting workflow takes over.

Transmission is not ours. We are not a Peppol operator and we do not claim to be one. If you are in scope in Belgium, France, Italy or Poland, the sending happens through your accounting package or your service provider, and that is where your compliance question belongs.

The section above about certification applies to us exactly as much as to anyone else selling you software. Ask us the same four questions.

We are building structured e-invoicing, starting with the Netherlands. We will show it working when it works, the way we have shown everything else.