Why PDF Invoices Won’t Disappear Overnight

If you work anywhere near invoicing, you’ve seen the contradiction: everyone talks about “digital invoicing,” yet a large part of the supply chain still runs on emailed PDFs. That isn’t because companies are lazy. It’s because PDF is frictionless: it works with every system, every partner, and every workflow, regardless of maturity.

At the same time, policy and market infrastructure are moving in the opposite direction. The strategic direction in Europe is increasingly clear: invoices are expected to be structured data, not just a legible document. The result is a transition period that will last years - where companies need practical bridging approaches instead of a “rip-and-replace” IT program.

Forces Pushing Digitization And eReporting

Two forces are accelerating the shift away from PDF-only invoicing: regulatory pressure and industrial digitization.

On the policy side, governments are not pushing structured eInvoicing because it is fashionable; they are pushing it because the financial incentive is massive. The EU’s VAT under-collection problem remains significant: one estimate puts the 2022 VAT Gap at €89.3 billion. Against that backdrop, the EU’s ViDA initiative is expected to recover at least €18 billion per year in VAT revenues, and over a decade, the anti-fraud measures alone translate into very large recovered revenues alongside an estimated ~€41 billion in business cost savings. That combination (tax recovery plus operational savings) is why the regulatory push is not slowing down. (The global shift to eInvoicing, 2025)

On the market side, large corporates and public-sector entities are modernizing invoice handling as part of broader procure-to-pay and order-to-cash digitization. That pull effect matters, because when a large buyer upgrades its accounts payable automation, it often pushes requirements outward into the supplier base. In parallel, the report describes a growing adoption of eReporting obligations, which reshapes not only how taxes are reported, but how invoices are issued, because reporting requirements are increasingly based on structured formats. (The global shift to eInvoicing, 2025)

This is the “why now” behind the shift: structured eInvoicing is becoming a compliance and reporting substrate, not a niche efficiency project.

PDFs Are Being Phased Out, But SMEs Still Rely On Them

The most important nuance in the debate is that “phasing out PDF” does not mean PDFs vanish from business processes tomorrow.

The whitepaper is explicit: many legal and commercial initiatives are aimed at phasing out PDF usage, yet PDFs still dominate notably among SME suppliers. It also stresses that this is a long-term effort, made more complex by the “spontaneous organic growth” of PDF invoice volumes - i.e., the market keeps producing more PDFs even while regulation tries to move it toward structured data.

That’s not hard to understand. PDFs persist because they are cheap, fast, and require near-zero integration effort. For an SME supplier, sending a PDF often feels like “good enough,” especially if they only have a few large customers with structured requirements. And even in more mature markets, the line between “electronic invoice” and “structured eInvoice” can be blurry - some volume counts include PDFs, and data availability differs significantly between countries. (The global shift to eInvoicing, 2025)

So when a buyer says, “we already do e-invoicing,” it can mean anything from emailing PDFs to fully automated, structured exchange and archiving. This is exactly why the transition will be uneven and why bridging solutions remain necessary.

The Practical Approach: Convert Where Needed, Standardize Data, Preserve Workflow

Smart companies handle this reality by treating the next few years as a controlled transition: keep operations stable, but make every step move you closer to structured, automated exchange.

A pragmatic bridging strategy has three parts:

1) Keep the human-readable document, but stop treating it as the source of truth.
The report notes that the demand for legibility often leads to rendering a PDF alongside a structured eInvoice for the parties to read. That is fundamentally different from a PDF as a “solo invoice.” In other words: the PDF can remain as the display layer, while structured data becomes the compliance and automation layer. 

2) Convert and validate at the edges - where requirements hit.
In the real world, requirements are partner-specific. A large customer might require Peppol BIS / EN 16931-compliant structured invoices; another might require EDIFACT; a public-sector entity may require a specific profile. Bridging means you don’t force every supplier workflow into a full ERP integration on day one. Instead, you implement a conversion layer that produces structured outputs where required and validates the data before it leaves your control. This is particularly important as eReporting obligations expand and increasingly rely on structured datasets.

3) Standardize your “trade data” while you bridge the formats.
Most long-term cost in invoicing digitization comes from inconsistent master data, inconsistent field semantics, and partner-by-partner variations. Bridging works best when you standardize your internal invoice dataset (your canonical model) and map outward from there - rather than building unique logic for every partner. This also reduces rework when new regulatory requirements arrive.

A useful mental model: if you cannot describe your invoice in a consistent structured dataset internally, you will pay for that inconsistency repeatedly - through exceptions, disputes, and re-mapping.

How To Avoid Building Technical Debt During The Transition

The danger of bridging is that it can become a patchwork - especially if every new partner adds a bespoke mapping and special handling. The goal is to bridge without creating an integration swamp.

Here are the principles that prevent technical debt from accumulating:

Make structured data the “truth,” and PDFs the “view.”
If you rely on PDF text as the dataset, you end up with brittle automation and audit risk - especially as reporting requirements become more structured and validation-driven. Treat PDF as a representation and ensure the structured dataset drives business logic.

If you use hybrid approaches, enforce consistency controls.
The report highlights “hybrid” eInvoices where a structured dataset and a legible image coexist in the same container - and stresses a critical requirement: the two datasets must be fully consistent. If they diverge, you introduce compliance and dispute risk. That consistency rule is a practical governance control you should adopt even if you aren’t using a formal hybrid container yet. (The global shift to eInvoicing, 2025)

Build reusable mappings, not one-off translations.
Use parameterised mappings, shared validation rules, and a controlled canonical model. The more you can reuse across partners, the less your cost scales with each new onboarding.

Invest in monitoring and exception handling early.
If you want a predictable transition, you need operational visibility - what failed, why it failed, and what was corrected. That is what prevents “digital invoicing” from turning into a more expensive form of manual work.

The Bottom Line

PDF invoices won’t disappear overnight because they sit at the intersection of speed, habit, and low technical friction. At the same time, Europe’s policy direction and reporting obligations are steadily increasing the value of structured invoices - and raising the risk of staying PDF-only.

The smartest move is not a big-bang replacement of every workflow. It’s a controlled bridge: keep the business running, convert where required, standardize the underlying data model, and prevent technical debt by treating structured data as the source of truth.

And if you want a simple benchmark to take away: even in the current global invoice volumes, electronic invoices are estimated at ~90 billion, and growth is expected at a minimum of ~20% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) over the next five years -numbers that underline how quickly the landscape is shifting.