We spend a lot of our time talking to finance teams about the 2029 mandate, and the same query comes up every time: "Are we ready?" Most people can’t answer that without an audit, or just guessing. So I turned the questions I kept hearing into the checklist below, nine questions you can run through in five minutes, no audit required.
Why this matters before 2029, not after
From April 2029, e-invoicing becomes mandatory for VAT invoices. The mandate's confirmed, and Peppol's locked in as the UK's interoperability network, HMRC named it back in June 2026. What's still coming is the detail: scope, thresholds and phasing, due at the Budget.
According to PPN's 2026 annual P2P survey, 40% of businesses are already reviewing their data and processes with the mandate in mind. If you haven't started that conversation yet, you're not alone, but it's worth catching up with where the market's already heading.
None of that means you need to overhaul anything. Whatever your invoices look like today, paper, PDF, EDI, there's a route from here to ready, and most of the work isn't yours to do. But that only holds once someone's checked where your business stands. That's what the next nine questions are for.
The checklist: nine questions for your finance team
Run through these with whoever owns invoicing and your ERP. No wrong answers, this is a starting point, not a test.
How your invoices move today
- Do most supplier invoices arrive as paper or PDF, a mix of PDF and structured formats, or mostly structured data already (EDI, Peppol, portal-based)?
- Does anyone in your supply chain already send or receive invoices over Peppol?
- Could you answer that one today, or would you need to ask around?
Your finance and ERP setup
- What's your finance system: spreadsheets, a legacy ERP with little automation, or a modern cloud platform?
- Has anyone checked whether that system can take structured e-invoice data directly, or would it need something in between?
Volume and ownership
- Roughly how many supplier invoices does your business process a month?
- Is there someone who could own getting the business mandate-ready over the next 12 to 18 months?
Peppol and the wider network
- Do you know whether your business already has a Peppol ID, or whether one exists anywhere in your group?
- If a customer or supplier asked you to connect over Peppol tomorrow, would you know who to call?
Answered "not sure" more than once or twice? You're in good company, and it's exactly why this checklist exists.
What this looks like once the data's moving
We don't ask the 17,000+ businesses in our community to change how they invoice today. Whatever they're already sending, PDF included, we turn it into the structured data the network needs.
Octavius, a civil engineering contractor processing thousands of invoices a month, saves around 16 hours of staff time for every 1,000 invoices it runs through us, time that's gone straight back into forecasting and supplier relationships instead of data entry. The same shift, structured data in, manual handling out, is exactly what gets a business ready for 2029 too.
