What is ViDA?
ViDA (VAT in the Digital Age) is a package of EU legislation that modernises the Union's VAT system around digital, transaction-level data. It was formally adopted by the Council on 11 March 2025, published in the Official Journal on 25 March 2025, and entered into force on 14 April 2025. The package amends the VAT Directive (2006/112/EC), the VAT Implementing Regulation (282/2011) and Regulation 904/2010 on administrative cooperation. Its measures roll out in stages between 2025 and 1 January 2035.
For anyone building or maintaining an e-invoicing pipeline, ViDA is the single most important piece of regulation to understand: it sets the direction of travel for every EU member state's mandate and fixes EN 16931 as the structured format at the centre of cross-border compliance.
The three pillars
ViDA is built on three independent but related pillars:
1. Digital Reporting Requirements (DRR) and e-invoicing. Mandatory structured e-invoicing and near-real-time digital reporting for intra-Community B2B transactions, replacing the current recapitulative statements (EC Sales Lists). This is the pillar with the deepest impact on ERP and invoicing systems. See the dedicated DRR entry for detail.
2. Platform economy. A deemed-supplier rule that makes platforms facilitating short-term accommodation and passenger transport liable to collect and remit VAT where the underlying supplier does not.
3. Single VAT Registration (SVR). An expansion of the One-Stop Shop (OSS) and reverse-charge rules so that a business needs only one EU VAT registration for most cross-border B2C activity, reducing the need for multiple national registrations.
Why ViDA matters for e-invoicing
The most consequential immediate change took effect on entry into force: member states no longer need a derogation from the European Commission to impose a domestic e-invoicing mandate, and they may do so without requiring buyer consent. This removed the legal friction that previously slowed national rollouts (Italy, France and Poland all needed special authorisation). The result is the wave of mandates now phasing in across the EU.
ViDA also redefines an electronic invoice: from the relevant entry-into-force dates, an e-invoice must be issued in a structured electronic format that allows automatic processing — a PDF or a scanned image no longer qualifies. The reference format is the European standard EN 16931, the same semantic model behind Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, XRechnung, Factur-X/ZUGFeRD and FatturaPA-adjacent profiles.
Key dates
The platform and single-registration measures phase in earlier, with key milestones around 2028 and 2030.
How ERP vendors encounter ViDA
ViDA is rarely a single feature ticket — it is the backdrop to almost every compliance decision. Vendors encounter it when (1) a customer asks whether their invoices will be "ViDA-ready", which in practice means EN 16931-conformant structured output; (2) national mandates that ViDA unblocked (France, Germany, Belgium, Poland) land on a roadmap; and (3) the 2030 cross-border DRR obligation forces reporting logic, not just invoice generation, into the product.
The practical takeaway: building to EN 16931 today, with clean separation between the semantic invoice model and country-specific CIUS rules, is the most direct way to be ready for both national mandates and the 2030 DRR layer. A compliance safety layer matters here because the same invoice must satisfy the EN 16931 core, a national CIUS, and — from 2030 — a reporting extraction, and a defect in any one of those breaks the chain.
Relation to EN 16931
EN 16931 is the semantic data model ViDA leans on. ViDA does not replace it; it elevates it from "the standard for B2G under Directive 2014/55/EU" to "the default structured format for cross-border B2B across the Union". Understanding EN 16931's business terms (BT-) and business groups (BG-) is therefore the foundation for understanding what ViDA actually requires on the wire.