Blog
Lithuania's e-invoicing mandate and Business Central: what to do before 2028
Sooner or later, every business in Lithuania will send its invoices as structured electronic files rather than PDFs or paper. Part of that is already the law. The rest is being built right now, with 2028 pencilled in as the year it reaches ordinary company-to-company trade. The useful skill is telling the two apart, because one deserves action today and the other only deserves attention.
The part that is already the law: selling to the public sector
Since 1 July 2017 you cannot send a paper or PDF invoice to a Lithuanian public body and expect to be paid. Public-sector e-invoicing became mandatory when the country transposed the EU directive on the subject (2014/55/EU) through its public procurement law. If you hold a government, municipal or other public contract of any size, above or below the EU tender thresholds, the invoice has to be a structured electronic document.
Since mid-2024 there is only one way to send it. The old eSąskaita portal was retired and replaced by SABIS (Sąskaitų administravimo bendroji informacinė sistema), run by the National Centre for Shared Services under the Ministry of the Economy. There was no gentle overlap: eSąskaita was switched off, SABIS became the sole channel, and that was that. You reach it through its portal, its API, or the Peppol network, and it expects the European standard formats, Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 or CII, both conforming to EN 16931. Keep the documents for ten years.
Since January 2025 the net is slightly wider: even invoices based on a verbal agreement, whatever the amount, have to go through SABIS. So if any part of your revenue comes from the public sector, this is not a future project. It is a compliance check you can run this week.
The part that is coming: business-to-business by 2028
Everything above concerns invoicing the government. The bigger change is the one that reaches every VAT-registered company: a mandate for structured e-invoicing on ordinary B2B trade.
Two things are worth being clear about. First, it is real. The Ministry of the Economy has been scoping it since 2023, tender and implementation plan included, and the stated intention is to reuse the SABIS and Peppol machinery rather than invent something new. Second, it is not yet law. The date everyone quotes, 1 January 2028, comes from the government’s plans and the analysts tracking them, not from a statute you can read today. Treat it as the direction of travel, firmly signalled, but a date that can still move.
The shape being described is much like the model France chose. Businesses exchange invoices directly with each other through certified access points, and the invoice data is reported to the tax authority in near real time, a so-called five-corner arrangement with SABIS as the reporting hub. The government has also talked about offering free, API-based tools so the smallest companies are not forced to buy software just to stay legal. All of that is design intent rather than published specification, so the details will firm up as the legislation does.
And then there is ViDA
Layered above the national plan is the EU’s VAT in the Digital Age reform. Its binding piece for the rest of the union, mandatory structured e-invoicing and digital reporting for cross-border B2B, lands around 2030. ViDA also removed an old obstacle along the way: member states used to need special permission from Brussels to force domestic e-invoicing on businesses, and that permission is no longer required. Building the domestic system for 2028 is, in effect, Lithuania getting its house in order two years before the cross-border rules arrive.
What this actually means for your Business Central
Here is the reassuring part. Business Central already speaks this language. It produces EN 16931-conformant e-documents and can send them over Peppol out of the box, and the public-sector scenario is supported today. Nobody has to rebuild their finance system to meet a Peppol mandate.
The work that remains is less glamorous and more practical:
- The reporting leg. Direct exchange of an invoice is largely a solved problem. Reporting that invoice to SABIS in the format and cadence the 2028 rules will demand is the piece that needs setting up once the specification is final.
- Clean master data. Structured invoices are unforgiving. A missing or malformed customer VAT number, a unit of measure that does not map to the standard, a tax setup that was “close enough” for a PDF: all of these pass silently on paper and fail loudly on a validated e-document. Most of the pain in e-invoicing projects is data, not code.
- A current version. Each Business Central release sharpens the e-document tooling. The further behind you are, the more of that improvement you leave on the table when the mandate bites.
None of this needs doing in a rush. But the version upgrade and the data clean-up are worth doing anyway, and doing them with 2028 in mind costs nothing extra.
A short list you can act on now
- If you invoice the public sector, confirm today that your Business Central is producing compliant documents into SABIS. This is a live legal requirement, not a drill.
- Check the quality of the VAT and registration data on your customers and vendors. Fix it before a mandate makes every gap visible.
- Find out how current your Business Central version is, and whether an upgrade is due on its own merits.
- Note which of your documents would have to become structured, so the eventual switch is a configuration exercise rather than a discovery exercise.
Where we come in
This is not new ground for me. At Alna Business Solutions I led an e-invoicing implementation and was the developer who built it: an integration based on the Peppol standard rather than a direct implementation of Peppol itself.
We have decided to treat Lithuanian e-invoicing as something worth getting properly good at, rather than a box to tick when a client panics in 2027. That means we follow the tender and the draft legislation as they move, so our clients do not have to, and we get Business Central ready end to end: compliant public-sector invoicing into SABIS today, and a clear path to the B2B mandate as its shape settles.
In practice that is an assessment of where your system stands, the configuration and version work to close the gap, the master-data clean-up that structured invoicing demands, and the reporting setup once the 2028 rules are fixed. Whether you already invoice the government or simply want to be ready before your competitors are scrambling, the calm way through is to start early with someone who has done the reading.
Not sure where your Business Central stands on Lithuanian e-invoicing? Tell us your story and we will give you an honest, free assessment.