Tomas Gogar, CEO of Rossum
The European e-invoicing market is on the brink of an overhaul, as mandatory e-invoicing and e-reporting regulations are mandated across the EU. From Belgium in January 2026 to France in September, fuelled by the European Commission’s VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA), enterprises are facing a critical compliance wake-up call to improve VAT revenue collection. However, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, the backbone of finance operations, were never designed for the regulatory volatility now unfolding.
Now, finance leaders are faced with a choice: leverage digital tools to match the digital age, or face fines, operational standstill, and reputational damage by relying on outdated ERP systems which fail to meet today’s compliance demands. This reliance can result in inefficient use of employee time reconciling mismatched formats and exceptions, general system delays and more. ERP acts as a foundation for compliance, but today’s mandates demand a level of agility that ERP cannot deliver on its own.
The ERP compliance illusion
For decades, ERP systems have been the cornerstone of finance and operations. They standardise processes, enforce disciplines and centralise enterprise data to ensure smooth operations. However, mandates are now moving faster than these systems, and ERP is quickly falling behind as regulations and directives become less stable and uniform.
Despite the EU’s standardisation goal, e-invoicing rules remain fragmented and evolve fast without warning. Each country then interprets these directives differently, from Italy’s real-time clearance, to France’s phased rollout and Poland’s size- and turnover-based deadlines, as well as non-EU countries like the UK, Switzerland and Norway.
When finance leaders assume that ERP vendors will automatically update systems to reflect every new government mandate, the true complexities of these regulations are vastly underestimated. Even when vendors issue patches, these typically lag behind government timelines and require manual implementation, testing and integration.
Meanwhile, finance teams scramble to adjust workflows with manual processes – converting formats, reconciling mismatched data, or maintaining spreadsheets to fill in the gaps without automating these steps and risking inaccuracies. These patchwork solutions erode the very efficiencies ERP was designed to deliver in the first place. What looks like a stable ERP process on paper often hides a tangle of spreadsheets and notes beneath the surface, exposing businesses to regulatory risk and operational inefficiencies.
A fragmented Europe
Europe’s vision of a harmonised digital single market clashes with the reality of managing 27 member states, each interpreting the same EU directive in its own way. For example, Italy mandates real-time clearance through the SDI platform, France is phasing in requirements gradually between 2026 and 2027, Poland ties its deadlines to company size and readiness, and Belgium and Germany are following their own schedules.
Add in post-Brexit requirements in the UK, and the unique models in Switzerland and Norway, and the standardisation challenge multiplies. Instead of a unified regulatory landscape, Europe has created a patchwork of local systems, formats and validation methods which businesses must navigate and stay on top of simultaneously.
The result is a compliance maze that no single ERP vendor –no matter how global– was ever built to navigate.
Why ERP fails at mandate management
ERP systems thrive when processes are structured, predictable and static. However, e-invoicing mandates are the opposite: fluid, fragmented and politically driven. Each new rule changes at multiple levels across data format, validation logic, submission of the invoice, and archiving requirements. It is also ever-changing: what was compliant last year might already be obsolete this year due to the rapidly transforming global trade landscape.
Add cross-border trade into the mix with multinational enterprises and the friction increases. A single enterprise may need to manage dozens of formats and workflows at once, and coordinate both inbound and outbound invoices under different national rules. Keeping pace through outdated ERP customisation alone creates not only financial, but technical debt.
Every delay increases exposure to fines, and every manual workaround slows down payment cycles whilst damaging supplier relationships in the process. This leads compliance to be an operational risk, not just a technical issue which leaders must wake up to.
The unknown costs of ERP dependence
Of course, the visible cost of lack of transformation and innovation is easy to measure, as every time a mandate shifts, enterprises scramble to pay for development hours, new testing, and new integration. Scratch the surface, however, and you uncover wasted team time, compliance fragments across XML, PDF and hybrid workflows, invalid invoices straining supplier relationships and a loss of trust in system accuracy for finance teams.
This is in addition to the reputational cost of compliance leaks. Once credibility is lost, teams will find it far more difficult to recover than from a hit to your balance sheet.
The case for a dedicated e-invoicing layer
ERP provides the foundations for finance operations, but it is not equipped to handle the pace or diversity of e-invoicing mandates. A dedicated compliance layer must be introduced to bridge this gap – a layer built to ingest multiple formats, validate data against each country’s evolving requirements, and feed accurate information into ERP and procurement systems.
Document processing that is leveraged by automation can be used to capture, enrich and validate invoices regardless of format or source, meaning ERP systems and finance teams can be insulated from the chaos of changing mandates.
Finance leaders who adopt this extra compliance layer aren’t just protecting their business, they’re building agility into the heart of their operations, protecting their reputation and company costs as a result.
Building a finance-ready operation
E-invoicing mandates aren’t slowing down. They’re expanding at ever-faster rates as governments demand transparency, tax accuracy, and fraud prevention. Each new mandate makes enterprise agility more valuable, and leaders who continue to rely on ERP alone risk failing their teams and falling into a cycle of costly customisations and manual fixes. Not least because ERP was never designed to adapt to these rapidly shifting mandates in the first place.
Now, finance leaders are faced with the choice of taking control of layered architectures and vendors, building resilience and enabling finance teams to remain agile under regulatory pressures. For those that adapt to these new measures, mandates won’t be constraints, but motivators that push enterprises to modernise and strengthen their supplier ecosystem.