In force · IT
E-invoicing in Italy.
The oldest B2B mandate in the EU: in force since January 2019, through SdI.
The calendar
| Date | Who | What becomes mandatory |
|---|---|---|
| 2015-03-31 | Suppliers to public bodies | B2G electronic invoicing, introduced by the Decree of 3 April 2013. |
| 2019-01-01 | Business to business | Electronic invoicing mandatory, introduced by Law 205/2018. |
Verified on 2026-08-17 against European Commission, eInvoicing in Italy. Mandate calendars move, and several of these have moved once already. If you are reading this well after that date, check the source before acting on it, and tell us if it has changed.
How invoices actually move
Sistema di Interscambio, the SdI. Italy is centralised: every invoice goes through the state exchange, which validates it and forwards it. There is no direct supplier-to-buyer path.
What the document has to be
FatturaPA, a national XML format, not Peppol BIS. Italy predates the European standard and kept its own.
What most summaries get wrong
- Italy is the counter-example to assuming Peppol everywhere. The document format is national and the transport is a state clearing house, so an integration built purely against EN 16931 and Peppol does not reach Italy without a FatturaPA mapping.
- Because SdI validates centrally, a rejected invoice is rejected by the state rather than by your customer, and the failure arrives asynchronously.
- It has been running since 2019, which makes Italy the one market where e-invoicing is ordinary rather than a project.
Where we fit
InvoiceForge builds and checks the document: it generates an EN 16931 invoice, validates one against the rules a real validator reports, and reads one back into structured data. An agent can call it directly.
It does not transmit. Reaching Italy means going through the network above, and that is a separate piece we would rather name than blur. You need both, and knowing which one you are missing is worth more than a page that implies one product does everything.
We are not affiliated with the European Commission, OpenPeppol, or any tax authority. The dates on this page come from the Commission's own country factsheets and, where one exists, the national portal linked above.