Surviving Peppol: How Belgian booking agencies automate eInvoicing

If you run an artist booking agency in Belgium, 2026 came with homework.

Since 1 January 2026, every B2B invoice must travel through the Peppol network—in structured XML format, with the correct VAT numbers and addresses—routed electronically to a government-approved access point. Paper invoices and PDFs are out.

Fines for non-compliance started at €1,500 per violation and climbed to €5,000 for repeat offenders.

And Belgium is just the first wave. Other EU countries already have their eInvoicing rollout planned:

• Germany's mandate started in 2025 and finishes rolling out 1 January 2028.
• France goes live in September 2026.
• Poland started their final phase on 1 April 2026.
• The EU's ViDA directive, adopted in March 2025, makes cross-border B2B eInvoicing mandatory across the entire bloc by 2030.

The Peppol network already connects 46 countries and 2.5 million registered organizations—this is the infrastructure the music industry is going to be running on.

A government compliance deadline doesn't care about your show schedule. It lands mid-process, when you've got contracts out for signature, deposits half-chased, and advances still to prep. The last thing any agency needs is another system to log into, another account to configure, another step between the invoice and the promoter.

That's exactly why we built InvoiceV2.

We worked closely with our Belgian customers facing the Peppol mandate. They helped us understand their compliance options, and we made sure InvoiceV2 fits into the workflows they'd already spent years refining.

In this post, we share the experiences and insights of four Belgian artist booking agencies into Peppol compliance:

• Tim Pijpen, Owner & Managing Director @ Nextar Artists
• Quentin Van Damme, Owner @ Ground Control Agency
• Lies Cuisinier, Financial Administrative Assistant @ Busker‍
• Kris Bloemen, Manager & Owner @ House of Entertainment

Crunching the numbers for Peppol implementation

When external software companies got wind of the mandate, they moved fast. Custom integration packages, standalone Peppol portals, compliance add-ons—a whole market appeared overnight, aimed squarely at companies that had no existing solution.

Tim ran the numbers on bridging SystemOne with a third-party Peppol tool. A custom integration, properly tested, would turn out to be quite costly.

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The manual route wouldn’t be any better.

Logging into a separate government portal each day to copy invoices across would cost Tim’s team at least an hour of extra admin every day.

Lies had done the same math from the other side. Managing finance and invoicing across Busker's 100+ artist roster, the cost of a separate compliance platform would chip a real dent in revenue.

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Two agencies, same conclusion: pay for a third-party tool, or spend hours doing it by hand. Either option would cost them time and money.

Fitting Peppol into booking agency workflows

All four booking agencies customized their SystemOne accounts to optimize their financial operations. A compliance solution that would require them to rebuild their invoicing workflows—or split their processes between two platforms—would create a serious bottleneck.

At Ground Control Agency, Quentin had built his whole booking intake process around one discipline: get the data right upfront.

Every new deal triggers a booking request form that captures the promoter's VAT number, venue address, and contact details before the contract and invoice even go out. No chasing promoters for missing details or finding errors when the invoice has already been sent.

At Busker, Lies runs hundreds of shows in parallel with a color-coded tagging system—confirmed deals, versus deals, and a green tag that tells the finance team the settlement is finalized and the invoice is safe to send.

At House of Entertainment, Kris manages entirely separate agendas for the comedy, events, and technical companies, all feeding into one overarching management view.

When we looked at adding a compliance layer, we knew it had to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows—not hinder them.

Nextar Artists had its VAT and withholding tax rules well established before the mandate came along, and none of that had to change.

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One workflow

Our team designed and built InvoiceV2 to be straightforward and easy to use, and to integrate well with the requirements set by the Peppol mandate. Peppol eInvoicing lives inside the same invoicing workflow agencies are already using on SystemOne, handled natively without routing through a third-party application.

For Quentin, the day-to-day difference was frictionless:

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SystemOne automatically detects whether the receiver is on the Peppol network. It generates the XML, attaches the required file, routes it through the Peppol network, and sends the email—all at once, in a single action.

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One System

SystemOne offers an end-to-end Peppol integration built directly into the product. One source of truth.

Competitors like ABOSS route Peppol through Billit—a third-party application that requires agencies to set up a separate account, obtain an API key, and configure the connection at the entity level. Gigwell and Overture have no documented Peppol capability.

Accounting made faster, not just compliant

Before using SystemOne at Busker, their booking, production, and finance departments each worked in separate spreadsheets, and pulling together an invoice meant manually copying data across three different sources.

With InvoiceV2, their whole pipeline—from booking to Peppol-compliant invoice—runs inside one platform.

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The connection to your accounting system is automated, too—you don't need to manually download and re-upload invoices for your accountant. The invoices sent via SystemOne are also fully EN16931 compliant for your own bookkeeping, even if your recipient isn’t Peppol-registered yet.

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Payment tracking and automated reminders work the same way—once an invoice is settled, the reminder sequence stops. You won't accidentally chase a promoter who's already paid.

One more thing: 120% Peppol tax deduction

The Belgian government introduced a 120% tax deduction on SaaS costs related to Peppol-compliant invoicing software, covering tax years 2024–2027.

If you spend €1,000 on qualifying software, you can have €1,200 deducted from your taxable profit. That covers subscription costs, implementation, and training.

SystemOne qualifies for this deduction, which means the platform managing your bookings, contracts, advancing, and Peppol compliance is also writing itself off your tax bill.

The mandate that looked like a cost turned out to be a financial opportunity ;)

The deadline passed. Get Peppol-ready today.

Belgium was the first test. Compliance in Germany, France, Poland, and the broader ViDA is looming. You'll eventually face some form of eInvoicing if your artist booking agency operates in Europe.

If you're already a SystemOne customer, Peppol-compliant eInvoicing is there waiting for you. If you're not, there's no better time to check out our platform.

‍Book a demo to see how InvoiceV2 fits your workflow, or request a trial and try it for yourself.