Peppol BIS Billing 3.0

What is Peppol BIS Billing 3.0?

Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is the Business Interoperability Specification (BIS) that defines how an invoice or credit note is formatted, validated, and exchanged on the Peppol network. "BIS" is a branded synonym for CIUS (Core Invoice Usage Specification): Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is the Peppol-flavoured customisation of the EN 16931 European invoicing standard, expressed as OASIS UBL 2.1 XML and enforced through a layered set of Schematron rules.

When people loosely say "a Peppol invoice", they almost always mean a Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 invoice. It is the format mandated for B2G procurement in most EU member states, the default B2B format on the Peppol network, and the syntax that every certified Access Point must be able to send and receive.

What "BIS" Means

Peppol publishes BIS specifications for several document types — orders, despatch advices, catalogues, credit notes, invoices. Each BIS is a profile that:

1. Picks a base specification (for billing, that's EN 16931 + UBL 2.1).
2. Adds business rules (cardinality, code-list restrictions, data-quality checks).
3. Defines transport requirements (Peppol BIS profiles only travel over Peppol Access Points).

The "3.0" version aligns with EN 16931 and is the only currently active billing BIS — Peppol BIS Billing 1.0 and 2.0 are deprecated.

Relationship to EN 16931

Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is fully CEN-conformant: any document that passes the Peppol BIS validation also satisfies EN 16931's core invoice model. Peppol adds restrictions on top of EN 16931 — for example, a narrower set of allowed payment means codes, mandatory cbc:CustomizationID and cbc:ProfileID values, and stricter rules on electronic addresses (BT-34 / BT-49) — but it does not relax any EN 16931 rule.

The defining identifiers placed on every Peppol BIS 3.0 invoice are:

The CustomizationID corresponds to BT-24 (Specification identifier) and is what receivers and validators use to recognise the document as a Peppol BIS 3.0 invoice.

Validation Stack

A Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 invoice is validated in three layers, in order:

1. UBL XSD — Structural validation against the OASIS UBL 2.1 invoice schema.
2. EN 16931 Schematron — The CEN-published business rules (BR-, BR-CL-, BR-CO-*) covering cardinality, totals, code lists, and conditionals.
3. Peppol Schematron — Additional Peppol rules (PEPPOL-EN16931- and PEPPOL-COMMON-) layered on top, covering Peppol-specific restrictions like electronic address scheme IDs and document type identifiers.

A document that passes the first two layers is EN 16931-conformant; a document that also passes the third is Peppol BIS 3.0-conformant. ERP vendors who want to interoperate broadly should test against all three.

What Goes in a Peppol BIS 3.0 Invoice

At minimum, every BIS 3.0 invoice carries:

Attachments are permitted — the November 2025 update of BIS 3.0 (v3.0.20) explicitly clarified that PDF attachments may be embedded as cac:AdditionalDocumentReference/cac:Attachment/cbc:EmbeddedDocumentBinaryObject, which is useful for hybrid PDF + structured-data workflows.

What ERP Vendors Need to Know

1. Test against the current release — Peppol BIS 3.0 is updated semi-annually (May and November). The November 2025 release is the current one as of this writing; subscribe to the OpenPeppol release notes and refresh your Schematron files on each cycle.
2. Use the official validation artefacts — OpenPeppol publishes XSD and Schematron files at docs.peppol.eu. Don't roll your own; receivers will reject documents that don't pass the official validators.
3. Don't conflate BIS 3.0 with national CIUSes — Italy's FatturaPA, France's Factur-X profile, and Germany's XRechnung are not Peppol BIS 3.0. They are separate CIUSes of EN 16931. Some networks (e.g. France's PPF, the German B2G platform) accept Peppol BIS 3.0 alongside the national format; others do not.
4. Mind the electronic address rules — Peppol BIS 3.0 requires BT-34 and BT-49 to use ISO 6523 scheme IDs from the Peppol code list (0088 GLN, 0192 Norwegian Org, 0201 IPA, 0208 Belgian Enterprise, etc.). Free-form email addresses are not acceptable.
5. Understand the upgrade cadence — As of v3.0.20, OpenPeppol typically deprecates the previous-but-one release after each cycle, so two consecutive missed releases can cause receiver rejections.

Relation to ViDA and the Future

Under ViDA (Pillar 1, DRR), EN 16931 will become the mandatory cross-border B2B invoicing standard from July 2030. Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 — and the Peppol network itself — is widely expected to be the default delivery mechanism, particularly given how many member states already use Peppol for B2G procurement. ERP vendors that ship Peppol BIS 3.0 today are functionally pre-aligned with ViDA's technical baseline.