FatturaPA

Italy was the first major EU economy to make B2B e-invoicing mandatory, starting in January 2019. Every invoice between Italian VAT-registered businesses must be issued in FatturaPA XML format and routed through the SdI clearance system. The SdI validates the structure, checks the supplier and buyer tax IDs, and forwards the invoice to the buyer. If the SdI rejects the invoice (formatting error, invalid VAT number), the supplier has five days to correct and resend, otherwise the supply is treated as not invoiced.

The clearance model is fundamentally different from the four-corner PEPPOL approach. In PEPPOL, the tax authority is not in the flow of each invoice; it sees aggregate data through periodic returns. Under FatturaPA and the SdI, the tax authority is the routing layer: it sees every B2B invoice in real time, which is what enables Italy's tax-gap initiative and ultimately drove the EU's ViDA framework toward similar models elsewhere.

Foreign businesses selling into Italy do not need to issue FatturaPA for their own invoices (their domestic invoicing rules still apply), but Italian buyers may need to issue a complementary self-billing FatturaPA through the SdI to record the inbound supply. For cross-border B2B from a non-Italian supplier, the buyer's reverse-charge accounting in Italy goes through this mechanism.