Peppol e-invoicing for Belgian veterinary practices

The rule, briefly

Since 1 January 2026, VAT-registered businesses in Belgium must issue and receive structured electronic invoices for domestic business-to-business transactions. The reference network is Peppol and the reference format is Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, built on the European EN 16931 standard. A PDF emailed to a client is not a structured invoice, however tidy it looks.

A three-month tolerance period ran to 31 March 2026. After it, non-compliance carries graduated fines reported at 1,500 EUR for a first offence, 3,000 EUR for a second and 5,000 EUR for a third within three months.

Other channels are permitted if both parties agree and the format still satisfies EN 16931 — but every taxpayer must be technically able to send and receive over Peppol regardless.

Why this lands differently on a veterinary practice

Business-to-consumer invoices are out of scope. For most companion-animal practices, the large majority of invoices go to private pet owners, and none of those are affected.

What is affected is the rest of your ledger, and it is easy to underestimate: farms and agricultural companies, stables and riding schools, breeders and kennels, catteries, shelters operating as legal entities, corporate and referral clients, other veterinary practices you invoice for referrals or locum work — and, on the other side, every supplier who now sends you a structured invoice.

That last one catches practices out. Even a purely small-animal clinic that never issues a single B2B invoice still has to be able to receive them.

What to do about it

1. Work out which of your clients are B2BAnyone with a Belgian VAT number. Pull the list from your current system rather than guessing — farms, stables and referring practices are the usual population.
2. Confirm you can receiveAsk whoever handles your bookkeeping which access point receives on your behalf, and check that suppliers' structured invoices actually arrive somewhere you look.
3. Check what your software sends"Peppol" on a feature list can mean sending, receiving, or both. Make the supplier say which, in writing. Ours sends; inbound is not built yet, and you should hold every supplier to that same precision.
4. Keep the VAT codes right at the lineA structured invoice is machine-read, so a wrong VAT code no longer gets quietly absorbed by a human reader. A veterinary invoice mixing a service, a medicine and a retail product needs the rate correct per line.

Common questions