The Clearance Model Mandatory e-invoicing in Europe, read at document level

Editorial policy

The rules this site is written under. They are specific enough to be broken, which is the point of writing them down.

Last updated 2026-08-22

1. Scope

The Clearance Model covers mandatory electronic invoicing and the digital reporting obligations attached to it, in the European Union and the wider European Economic Area. It is written in British English, uses the euro, and refers to the legal instruments of the Union and of its Member States.

It does not cover invoicing regimes outside Europe, and it does not drift into adjacent subjects — procurement, treasury, enterprise software selection in general — except where a mandate makes them unavoidable.

2. Sourcing

Primary sources only. In descending order of authority:

  1. Directives, regulations and implementing acts as published in the Official Journal of the European Union.
  2. National legislation as published in the official gazette of the Member State that enacted it.
  3. Technical specifications published by the body that maintains them — CEN and its technical committee for electronic invoicing, OASIS for the UBL syntax, UN/CEFACT for the CII syntax, OpenPeppol for the Peppol specifications.
  4. Guidance, technical documentation and test environments published by the national tax administration responsible for the obligation.
  5. Consultation documents, explanatory memoranda and impact assessments, clearly identified as such.

Not sources: vendor blogs, consultancy summaries, press releases, webinar recordings, conference slides, and the large volume of secondary content in this market that cites other secondary content. Where such material is the only place a claim appears, the claim does not appear here.

Three to five outbound links per article, visible at the foot of the page and reproduced in the structured data. They open in a new tab and they are not obfuscated, wrapped or monetised.

If a fact has no linkable source, the sentence is rewritten without the fact. This is the rule that costs the most and matters the most. It is why some articles say "the threshold is set by national law" instead of naming a number.

3. Dates

This is the only rule on the site with two halves, because e-invoicing has two kinds of date.

Publication dates

Never generated, never backdated, never staggered to simulate a history that did not happen. The launch batch shares one date because it was published on one day, which is what a new publication looks like. An article carries a revision date only if it was genuinely revised, and the structured data always matches what is printed on the page. The build fails if any of this is violated.

Obligation dates

Every date attached to a mandate carries a status:

  • In force — enacted, published, and applicable.
  • Adopted — enacted and published, but applying from a future date.
  • Proposed — announced, drafted, under consultation or before a legislature. Not something to plan against without saying so.

Dates are rendered in a block that will not accept an entry without one of those three labels. A date presented as settled when it is a proposal is the single most common error in writing about this subject, and it is the one most likely to cost a reader money.

4. What an article has to contain

  • One original element of value: a comparison table, a worked calculation, a diagram, a checklist, a dated timeline or a cost model. Not a rewrite of the source in different words.
  • Three to five outbound primary sources, from at least two different hosts.
  • Three to five questions and answers, marked up so search engines can read them.
  • Three to six links to other articles on this site, so a reader can follow a subject rather than land on it.
  • A named author, visible above the headline and again at the foot.

5. Authorship and competence

Every article is written by Nil Masferrer Jiménez, Editor and compliance analyst. The competence claimed is stated plainly on the about page and nowhere exceeded: administration and finance, cost modelling, and direct reading of legislation and technical specifications.

No field experience is fabricated. This site does not claim to have implemented an ERP, run an access point, or sat in a tax audit. Where an article describes what happens in practice, it describes what the documents require and what follows logically from them, and it is written so a reader can tell the difference.

Nothing on this site is generated and published without being written and checked by a person.

6. Corrections

Errors get fixed. A material correction — one that changes what a reader would do — is made in the article, and the article records that it was revised. Trivial fixes to typography and grammar are made silently.

The fastest way to have something corrected is the contact page, with the page and the sentence.

7. Independence from advertising

  • No advertiser sees an article before publication.
  • No advertiser can commission, suggest, kill or amend an article.
  • No article recommends a single named product as the answer to a compliance obligation.
  • Comparison articles set out what to test and what to ask, not who to buy from.
  • Any commercial relationship that could reasonably be thought to affect what is written is disclosed in the article itself, not only on the advertising disclosure page.

8. What this publication will not do

  • Publish content written by anyone else, including guest posts and contributed articles.
  • Sell, insert, exchange or accept payment for links.
  • Republish a vendor's material under an editorial byline.
  • Present a proposal as law.
  • Tell an individual reader that their implementation is compliant.

9. Artificial intelligence

Language models are used the way a spelling checker and a search index are used: to find candidate sources, to draft an outline, to check readability. They are not used to generate the substance of an article, and no text is published that the editor has not written, checked against the source, and taken responsibility for. Every illustration and diagram on this site is generated from code written for this site — no stock imagery, and no image models.

10. Reader data

Covered in full by the privacy policy and the cookie policy. In summary: analytics only after consent, advertising cookies only after consent through a certified consent platform, and no newsletter list, no tracking pixels from social platforms, and no sale of reader data of any kind.