E-Invoicing in Denmark

Denmark and all the Nordics countries have been pioneers of electronic invoicing. E-invoicing even became mandatory for all B2G transactions with central public administrations as early as 2005, which puts Denmark at the forefront of e-invoicing in Europe and even in the world!

And now Denmark is going one step forward, or should we say several steps forward at once. Indeed, the new “Bookkeeping Act” will move a lot of business processes onto the digital road, and among them the invoicing.

However, this law is very monolithic and can make things very complicated for companies, service providers and software developers. Indeed, the main principle of this law is to mandate the use of a certified solution, or to let companies build their own solution in compliance with the law.

As such, many companies will be led to choose comprehensive solutions that handle all the accounting processes, but such a solution does not exist. There are invoicing software, ordering software, treasury management systems, etc., and not one solution covers properly all the accounting processes.

Consequently, this new law may reduce the granularity of the solution landscape that companies have at their disposal, and force them either to move to sub-par do-it-all solutions, or to build their own solution at their own expense & risk.

Similarly, this law has a huge impact on service providers by almost closing the Danish market to many of them: the ones that won’t be able to find a partnership with a bookkeeping software editor. It may lead to a lack of competition and possibly later to a drop in quality of all accounting solutions (including the e-invoicing solutions) on the Danish market.