Rule BR-03
An invoice must have an issue date
Every invoice carries the date it was issued, as a plain calendar date with no time and no timezone.
Business term BT-2, Invoice issue date. Source: EN 16931. Our wording, not the normative text, which is published in the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 rule list and was checked against it on 2026-08-16.
Why it fires on invoices that look fine
Almost nobody hits this rule because they forgot the field exists. They hit it because something between their system and the document dropped it, changed its shape, or filled it with a value that is right somewhere else. These are the causes worth checking first.
- The date is sent as a full timestamp. A value like 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z is a datetime, and the field takes a date.
- The date is formatted for humans rather than for the schema: 16/08/2026 and 08/16/2026 are both rejected, and they are also ambiguous, which is why the norm does not accept them.
- The value is a spreadsheet serial number, which happens when an export path reads the raw cell rather than the formatted value.
What to change
- Send YYYY-MM-DD and nothing else. The underlying type is an XML Schema date, which accepts no time part, so a trailing T00:00:00 is not a harmless extra.
- Strip any time component at the boundary of your export rather than in the invoice model, so every document leaves in the same shape.
- If your data really has a timestamp, decide which calendar day it belongs to in the seller's timezone before converting. Converting in UTC silently moves late-evening invoices into the next day, and an invoice dated one day into the next VAT period is a problem no validator will catch for you.
The validator runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and you can confirm that yourself with the network panel open.
Rules you are likely to hit next
A document that breaks BR-03 usually breaks one of these too, because the same mapping gap tends to affect neighbouring fields.
- BR-02: invoice number
Questions people actually ask
- What does BR-03 mean?
- Every invoice carries the date it was issued, as a plain calendar date with no time and no timezone.
- Which field does BR-03 apply to?
- BT-2, Invoice issue date. That is the name the semantic model uses, which is what you search for in your own system's mapping when the identifier alone does not tell you which field to look at.
- Does our validator check BR-03?
- Yes. Paste your invoice data into the free validator and it reports this rule with the value it actually saw, without the document leaving your browser.