ViDA has been "coming" for so long that most practices have stopped reading about it. It was adopted on 11 March 2025, the dates are now fixed in the VAT Directive, and the first one that binds a client is 1 July 2030. This is the version for accountants: what is required, of whom, by when, and what it has to do with the supplier invoices your team keys in today.
What ViDA is
VAT in the Digital Age is a package of amendments to the VAT Directive with three pillars: digital reporting requirements and e-invoicing, VAT for the platform economy (short-term accommodation and passenger transport), and single VAT registration. This post covers the first pillar only; it is the one that changes the plumbing of every firm's bookkeeping.
The dates that matter
Since 2025. Member states can mandate domestic B2B e-invoicing without asking the Commission for a derogation, and can require customers to accept structured e-invoices. This is why Germany, Belgium, Poland, France, Spain and others have been able to set their own timelines, and why Malta can announce an accelerated rollout. Our country pages track each one.
February 2026. The modernised EN 16931 standard was adopted, so the data model that ViDA e-invoices follow is settled.
1 July 2030. Digital reporting and e-invoicing become mandatory for intra-EU B2B transactions. The EC Sales List is replaced for those transactions. Structured e-invoices, based on Directive 2014/55/EU and EN 16931, become the default for cross-border B2B; paper and PDF invoices no longer count for these supplies.
1 July 2032. The legacy VIES system is phased out in favour of the central VIES built from the new reporting.
1 January 2035. Member states with domestic e-invoicing or real-time reporting introduced before 2024 must harmonise them with the EU model.
Which transactions
From July 2030 the reporting covers intra-Community supplies and acquisitions of goods, B2B services taxed where the customer is established, reverse-charge supplies where the supplier is not established in the customer's country, supplies of gas, electricity, heating and cooling to taxable dealers, and triangulation. Domestic transactions are not covered by the EU rule; a member state may add them, and several already have.
For a Maltese or Irish practice this means the cross-border purchases of clients: the software subscription from Dublin, the goods from a German wholesaler, the consultancy invoice from the Netherlands. Every one of those becomes a reported transaction on both sides.
What "digital reporting" means in practice
The supplier issues a structured e-invoice within ten days of the chargeable event and transmits header-level data from it, including the supplier's bank details so authorities can follow payment, to its tax authority within ten days. The customer reports the same transaction within five days of receiving the e-invoice. The tax authority sends it on to the central EU system, where the two sides are matched.
Note what is reported: header-level data, transaction by transaction, in near real time. Note what is not, yet: line items. But the e-invoice itself, in EN 16931, carries every line in structured form, and several member states' domestic regimes already report more than the EU minimum.
What it has to do with supplier invoices today
Nothing legally, until 2030 for cross-border and whenever each member state decides for domestic. Practically, quite a lot.
The information ViDA reports is information every supplier invoice already contains: supplier identity and VAT number, invoice number and date, net, VAT and total, and increasingly the lines behind them. A practice that captures that data in structured form today, for every client and every invoice, has the pipeline that reporting will plug into. A practice that captures headers only, or keys invoices by hand into forty separate client ledgers, will be building the pipeline in 2029 under deadline.
There is also a quieter point. Suppliers will keep sending PDFs, photos and paper for years: mandates apply to the issuer's country, small suppliers get later dates, and non-EU suppliers are outside the rule. The firm's job of turning unstructured documents into structured bookings does not go away; it becomes the on-ramp to reporting.
What a firm should do in the next twelve months
Map which clients have intra-EU B2B transactions and roughly how many a month; they are the first affected. Check whether each client's accounting system can issue and receive EN 16931 invoices; the software's roadmap and each country's format matter here. Move supplier-invoice capture to something that reads every line and keeps the data structured, so that when a domestic mandate arrives in your country the bookings are already in the shape the reporting needs. And read your own country's page: Malta has said it will move ahead of 2030, and Germany, Belgium, Poland and France already have dates.
If you want to see how line-level capture into your accounting software looks for a multi-client practice, the workflow guide walks through it, or book a demo.