Invoice generator FAQ: VAT, PDF, Peppol and privacy

Draftbill is free and has no accounts. Your drafts, saved invoices, customers, company profile and logo are stored in your browser’s local storage on this device and are never uploaded. The price of that privacy is that the data does not follow you to another browser or computer, so export a backup file from the saved-data section if you want a copy.

Draftbill builds the document from the rules of the country you choose and shows a checklist of the fields the law asks for, with the legal basis next to each. That helps you issue a compliant invoice, but validity depends on your facts: whether you are VAT-registered, what you sold, who the customer is and which special scheme applies. You remain responsible for each invoice. The disclaimer lists what the checklist does not cover.

Eighteen: Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and India. Each has its own page with VAT or sales-tax rates, required invoice fields and the e-invoicing situation. Other EU countries are not offered yet because their rates and field rules have not been checked against an official source. You can still bill a customer in any other country by choosing their country in the customer address.

Press Download PDF. Draftbill opens your browser’s print dialog with a print stylesheet that shows only the invoice on A4 paper; choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. Because the browser draws the page itself, the text stays selectable and sharp, and the PDF matches the preview. Turn off “Headers and footers” in the print dialog if your browser adds a date and address line.

Peppol is a network for exchanging structured e-invoices between access points, and Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is its invoice format, based on the European standard EN 16931. You need it when a customer or a law requires structured invoices: for example, Belgian VAT-registered businesses must send domestic B2B invoices as structured e-invoices over Peppol since 1 January 2026, and many public buyers across Europe receive invoices only that way. If your customer is happy with a PDF and the law of your country allows it, you do not need it.

Peppol files are strict. The export is blocked until the invoice has what the specification makes mandatory: the seller’s VAT number with country prefix, a Peppol address and scheme for both seller and buyer, a buyer reference or purchase-order number, an invoice number and date, at least one complete line, a tax note for exempt and reverse-charge sales, and a payment due date or terms. The Peppol section lists exactly which items are missing and fixes itself as you fill them in.

No. In your browser it checks that the mandatory elements of the specification are present and that no element is empty, which catches the most common rejections. It does not run the full Peppol schematron rule set, so your access point can still reject a file for a rule that Draftbill does not check, such as a national add-on. Send the file to your access point’s validator before you rely on it.

Choose the currency at the top of the tool. Within the EU the VAT amount on the invoice must also be stated in the currency of your member state when your invoice is in another currency (Article 230 of the VAT Directive). When the invoice currency differs from your country’s currency, Draftbill asks for an exchange rate and prints the VAT amount in your national currency below the totals. Use the rate your tax authority prescribes, which is often the central bank’s rate on the date the tax became due.

Each line total is quantity times unit price, rounded to the smallest unit of the currency. Lines are then grouped by tax rate, and the tax is calculated once per group on the group’s net amount and rounded half away from zero. This is the method the EN 16931 standard expects and it avoids the one-cent differences that appear when tax is rounded line by line. Amounts are calculated with exact decimal arithmetic, not floating point.

Under reverse charge the customer, not the seller, accounts for the VAT. It applies, for example, to many business-to-business services supplied to a VAT-registered customer in another EU country. Choose “Reverse charge” as the tax on a line, enter your customer’s VAT number and a note such as “Reverse charge”; the invoice then carries no VAT amount for that line. Which supplies qualify depends on the place-of-supply rules and national schemes, so confirm with your tax authority.

Not as a separate document type. Draftbill makes standard invoices (Peppol document type 380). For a correction you can issue a new invoice with a negative line and a note that refers to the original; check that your country accepts that form. Recurring customers are supported by saving a customer and your profile locally and loading them into the next invoice, which also advances the invoice number.

Clearing site data removes everything Draftbill stored, including drafts, saved invoices, customers and your logo, because there is no copy on a server. Export a backup file before you clear data, switch browsers or reinstall; you can import it again from the saved-data section. “Erase all data on this device” does the same thing on purpose.