Quick question: do you know, off the top of your head, whether Spain now requires a QR code and digital signature on every invoice? Or whether Denmark wants carbon footprint data riding along inside your e-invoices? If you manage finance across more than one country, questions like these aren’t trivia. They’re your Tuesday. And the answer usually lives in a spreadsheet somewhere, updated by whoever had time last quarter.
That’s the world Business Central is quietly rebuilding. Country by country, it’s absorbing rules that used to live in your head, your spreadsheets, or a bolted-on third-party tool, and turning them into things the system just handles.
The idea in one minute: 2026 release wave 1 adds a wave of native e-invoicing and tax-compliance features to Business Central: electronic invoicing for France, expanded e-invoice formats for German service invoices, an embedded Verifactu mode for Spain, and carbon-footprint data inside Danish e-invoices. Alongside that, Business Central now calculates plastic and sugar taxes, vendor withholding tax, and excise taxes natively, so you’re not sourcing a separate app or building your own spreadsheet logic. None of this eliminates your job, but it does shrink the part of your job that’s just tracking who changed what rule, in which country, this month.
E-invoicing is no longer optional, and Business Central is catching up 📨
France is the one to watch first. E-invoicing and e-reporting become mandatory for all VAT-registered businesses in France starting September 2026, following the DGFiP’s “five-corner” model. Business Central is adding support for the two compliant formats, Peppol BIS3 and Factur-X, routed through certified Partner Dematerialization Platforms, with full invoice lifecycle tracking built in.
Germany’s e-invoicing rules had a gap: service invoices weren’t covered. That’s changing now. You’ll be able to generate service invoices in the same German e-invoice formats (XRechnung, ZUGFeRD, Peppol BIS) already used for standard purchase and sales documents. That’s one process instead of a workaround for service-heavy businesses.
Spain’s rule is arguably the sharpest. Verifactu requires real-time invoice submission to the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT), with a digital signature, a hash chain linking each invoice to the last, and an official QR code on the final document. Business Central’s embedded Verifactu mode automates that chain: you post the invoice, it goes to AEAT, the QR code comes back embedded, and you’re done.
And in Denmark, Business Central is piloting something forward-looking: an OIOUBL e-invoice format that automatically embeds carbon footprint data pulled from item cards or the Sustainability module, on both the sending and receiving side. E-invoicing is starting to track what a transaction cost the planet, not just whether you got paid.
Taxes you used to calculate by hand 🧮
E-invoicing isn’t the only area getting native support. Three tax types are moving into Business Central directly:
Plastic and sugar taxes can now be calculated from item and asset composition data. New fields track excise tax type and quantity, and the system aggregates the tax basis from purchases, production, and sales automatically. The country-specific declaration forms are still out of scope for now, so this gives you the underlying numbers, not the finished filing.
Withholding tax for vendors is a bigger deal than it sounds. If you’ve ever had to withhold tax from a vendor payment and track the liability by hand, this used to mean a third-party add-on or a homemade workaround. Now it’s standard: set up withholding tax posting groups, and Business Central calculates and withholds automatically when you post or pay an invoice.
Excise taxes get a flexible framework too, calculated by weight, volume, quantity, sugar content, or alcohol volume. Like plastic/sugar tax, statutory reports aren’t included yet. This is the calculation engine, with reporting built on top.
What this actually means for you
If you run finance for one country, this might feel distant. If you run finance across several, this is the good kind of boring: less time reverse-engineering what changed in a country’s tax code this quarter, less risk from a manual process someone forgot to update, less need to pay for and maintain a bolt-on compliance tool per jurisdiction.
It’s not fully hands-off yet. Several features ship as public previews before general availability, and a few, excise and plastic/sugar tax notably, hand you the calculation without the final statutory report. ✅ Get familiar with the setup now, especially if you’re in France ahead of that September 2026 mandate, so you’re not scrambling later.
Thank you for reading!
Last time, in “Take Control of Your AI Agents,” we talked about keeping an eye on the AI coworkers now doing real transactional work in your system. Next up, post #4, “Connected Business,” looks at how Business Central is tying itself more tightly to the rest of your business stack. ☕
Sources
- Business Central 2026 release wave 1 planned features
- Enable electronic invoicing in France
- Use e-invoice formats for service invoices in Germany
- Enable embedded Verifactu mode in Spain
- Use carbon footprint with OIOUBL e-invoicing format
- Calculate taxes for plastic and sugar
- Calculate withholding taxes for vendors
- Calculate excise taxes
- 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot Studio offerings
Interested in learning more? Below are some of my latest posts:
Leave a Reply