About The Clearance Model

Last updated 2026-08-22

Why this site exists

There is no shortage of writing about electronic invoicing in Europe. Almost all of it is produced by companies that sell software to comply with it. That writing is not dishonest, but it has a shape: every problem it describes has a product at the end of it, every deadline is urgent, and the awkward questions — what the law actually says, what happens if you do nothing, whether the thing being sold is required at all — tend not to get asked.

The Clearance Model was set up to ask them. It covers the same ground as a vendor blog, and it answers to nobody who sells anything in this market.

The subject matter is narrow on purpose. Not digital transformation, not finance automation, not the future of the CFO. Mandatory electronic invoicing: which businesses have to issue a structured invoice, from what date, under which national law, in what format, over which network, with what evidence, kept for how long.

What is on it

Fifty articles at launch, grouped into six sections:

• Mandates and deadlines — the obligation itself, country by country.
• Standards and formats — the European semantic model, the syntaxes that carry it, and the national profiles above them.
• Networks and transmission — how a document actually gets from one company to another.
• VAT and digital reporting — what the tax administration receives, and what it does with it.
• Integrity, signatures and archiving — what has to remain provable, and for how long.
• Implementation and operations — the work between the decision and the first live document.

Every article links out to the documents it relies on. If a claim has no source you can open, the sentence gets rewritten without the claim.

Who writes it

Nil Masferrer Jiménez writes and edits The Clearance Model. His background is administration and finance: cost analysis, total cost of ownership modelling, and reading legislation, implementing acts and published technical specifications directly rather than through somebody else's summary.

What that means in practice, and what it does not mean, is worth being precise about, because this is a field where a great deal of authority is claimed and very little of it is evidenced.

• He does not sell, resell, implement or support e-invoicing software, and holds no commercial relationship with any provider named on this site.
• He does not operate an access point, a platform, or an accounting practice.
• He is not a lawyer, a tax adviser or an accountant, and nothing here is advice about your situation. See the disclaimer.

What he does is take a mandate, the standard it points at and the specification a receiver validates against, work out what they jointly require, and set the reasoning out so that a reader can check it against the source. Where something is genuinely unclear — and in this field a great deal is — the article says so rather than picking the answer that reads best.

The editorial rules

The full version is in the editorial policy. The short version:

1. Primary sources only. Directives and regulations from the official journal, national legislation from the official gazette that published it, technical specifications from the body that maintains them, guidance from the tax administration that issued it. Not a summary of a summary.
2. A date without a status is not a date. Every rollout date on this site is labelled as in force, adopted or proposed, because a proposal that has not been enacted is not something to plan against.
3. No invented figures. No made-up adoption percentages, no unsourced cost savings, no rounded statistics with no origin. Where a figure illustrates a structure rather than reporting a measurement, the figure says so.
4. Corrections are published, not quietly edited. If something material is wrong, it gets fixed and the article records that it was revised.
5. Advertising never influences what is written. See below.

How it is paid for

By advertising, and eventually by affiliate arrangements with software that readers of a site like this one plausibly need. Both are disclosed in full on the advertising disclosure page.

The important part is structural rather than promissory: no advertiser is shown an article before it is published, no advertiser can commission one, and no article on this site recommends a single named product as the answer. Comparison pieces set out what to test and what to ask, not who to buy from.

What this site is not

It is not a compliance service. It cannot tell you whether your entity is in scope, and it should not be the last thing you read before a filing deadline. It is written to make you a better-informed buyer of the advice you do need, and to make the source documents readable enough that you can check the answer yourself.

If you think something here is wrong, tell me — with the page and the sentence, if you can. That is the fastest route to it being fixed.

Publisher

The Clearance Model is published by Nil Masferrer Jiménez, a private individual based in Argentona, Barcelona, Spain. It is not a company and has no employees. Contact and full publisher details are on the contact page; the formal legal notice is in the terms of use.