The UK chose a model with no central portal. Here is what that moves onto you.

On 23 June 2026 the UK confirmed its direction of travel: mandatory B2B e-invoicing from April 2029, built on the Peppol network, using a four-corner model. A detailed roadmap is expected at the November 2026 Budget, so the detail is not settled and anyone telling you otherwise has not read the same documents.

Read the decision carefully and something unusual emerges. HMRC did not put itself in the middle. There is no central government portal to file into. Invoices move directly between businesses, through access points that each side chooses for itself.

That matters operationally. When a filing goes to a portal, the portal tells you it failed. When a document goes to a trading partner through two access points, the rejection comes back into a space that has no owner by default. It is where two ERPs disagree about a field, and where a message sits unread for nine days because nobody is quite sure whose job it was.

Three things are worth starting now, and none of them require a decision about software. Clean the master data — participant identifiers, VAT numbers and unit codes are where the first rejections come from. Make sure the invoice line data exists as data, not as a PDF attached to an email. And name the person who owns a rejection before the volume arrives.