Greece moved the last phase of its B2B mandate to 2 November
· Questa pagina è disponibile in inglese.
Greece moved the second phase of its domestic B2B e-invoicing obligation from 1 October to 2 November 2026, by decisions issued on 30 September. A buyer established elsewhere in the Union was never inside it, still receives an ordinary attachment by email, and still has a price list to check it against.
An invoice set against the price list that supplier sent, with the lines that differ named in the reply, is what Price Double Check does, and it is the whole of this piece for anyone buying Greek goods. A mandate governing how an invoice travels inside one country leaves that comparison where it was.
What happened and under which instrument
Greece split its obligation in two. The first phase took effect on 2 March 2026 for businesses with revenue above one million euros. The second was due on 1 October and did not arrive: joint decisions of the Ministry of National Economy and Finance and the revenue authority, issued on 30 September, moved it to 2 November 2026 and set a transitional period to 31 January 2027, during which a business may still issue in parallel. Issuing is done through a certified service provider, through the authority's own free issuing application, or straight from a business system against the myDATA interface.
The European authorisation behind it is Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2025/502 of 5 March 2025, which lets Greece depart from Articles 218 and 232 of the VAT directive — the two articles that otherwise oblige a member state to accept paper and require a recipient's agreement before an invoice may be electronic. It covers invoices issued by taxable persons established in Greece, and runs to 31 December 2027.
The border in the text is the part that matters
Read that scope again as a buyer. The authorisation reaches invoices issued by a taxable person established in Greece, and the national obligation built on it applies to domestic business-to-business sales. A sale from a Greek supplier to a business established in another member state sits outside the structured requirement, so the recipient's agreement still governs the form the invoice takes and a buyer who wants a readable document can keep asking for one.
So a wholesaler in Tallinn or Dublin buying olive oil, table olives or wine from an Athens supplier should expect exactly what arrived last month: an attachment, in whatever shape that supplier has always sent. The same was true of the Polish invoice that lives in a national system and of the French reception obligation before it. National mandates land on national transactions first, and the cross-border case follows years later.
What does improve, quietly
There is a second-order gain, and it is real. A supplier that has moved its issuing onto certified software stops producing invoices by hand. Document numbers become sequential, the item code gets printed because the system requires it, and a description comes out the same way twice.
That is worth something specific. The single most expensive property of a supplier invoice is an unstable item code, because the code is the only key a comparison can join on: in the documents behind this service, 335 of 442 lines carried a description that did not match its own price-list row. Software that prints the code on every line removes that whole class of work.
| As of 2 November | What changed | What a foreign buyer sees |
|---|---|---|
| A Greek supplier selling to a Greek business | Electronic issuing is obligatory | Nothing, this is not your transaction |
| A Greek supplier selling to you in the Union | Outside the obligation | The same attachment as before |
| The supplier's invoicing software | Certified, or the authority's own | Steadier codes, numbers and units |
| The supplier's price list | Untouched by any of this | A spreadsheet, sent when they choose |
| Your verification of the price | Unchanged | Still yours to do |
The price list is still outside every mandate
The last two rows are the point. Each of these reforms governs the invoice, and not one of them governs the document the invoice should agree with. A supplier's price list remains a workbook sent at an interval of the supplier's choosing, with no version number and no validity dates, and no mandate anywhere obliges anyone to send you the current one. The argument for that gap being permanent is made at greater length in what a structured line does and does not settle.
Which leaves the work where it was before either date. Take the delivery date, find the price list in force on it, join on the supplier's item code, compare the net price per unit, and allow a cent either way because lists quote four decimals and invoices are issued to two. A better-formed invoice makes that faster and never makes it unnecessary, and it is the same check on either kind of document.
In breve
- Whether a Greek supplier may now refuse to send a PDF
- Not to a buyer established in another member state. The obligation built on the authorisation covers domestic sales, so for a cross-border one the ordinary rule applies and the form remains a matter of agreement between the two parties.
- What the transitional period to 31 January means
- A business brought in by the second phase may issue in parallel until the end of January 2027. In practice a buyer may receive both an electronic document and a familiar attachment for the same sale, and should check the one that carries the line prices.
- Which document to compare against the price list
- Whichever one states a net price per unit against an item code. If both arrive and they disagree, that disagreement is itself the finding, and the two should be put side by side before either is paid.
Forward one invoice and the price list it should have been billed on, from a Greek supplier or any other, and the lines that do not match come back by email with the difference against each one.