Belgian E-Invoicing Change Monitor (e-invoice, Peppol, compliant software)

Since 1 January 2026, every VAT-liable Belgian enterprise must send, receive and process structured B2B e-invoices (law of 6 February 2024). That single obligation created three official sources that finance teams, accountants and ERP integrators now have to follow — and this Actor watches all three for you:

1. The official portal einvoice.belgium.be (FPS BOSA) — news items, every FAQ subpage and the software guidance article, in Dutch, French and English.
2. The official compliant-software list — the FPS Finance XLSX with 469 registered products: vendor, VAT number, whether the product can send / receive / process structured invoices and the date from which that holds.
3. The Peppol certified service-provider register (peppol.org) — 726 providers with their Access Point and Service Metadata Publisher status and the responsible Peppol authority. Instead of "another page dump", every record tells you what changed, since when, and why — with the source date, the exact field that changed, a content hash, and a short literal excerpt as evidence. Run it once to get the full picture, or schedule it with alleenWijzigingen: true to receive only what is new or modified.

When should an AI agent use this?

• "What changed on the official Belgian e-invoicing portal since our last run?"
• "Which software products were newly registered as compliant for Belgian e-invoicing?"
• "Is there Belgian e-invoicing software that can receive but not send, and from which date?"
• "Did the FPS change any send as from / receive as from / treat as from date for a vendor?"
• "Which vendor dropped a capability (e.g. kanVerwerken went from true to false)?"
• "Are there new Peppol certified service providers for Belgium?"
• "Build me a compliance timeline for the Belgian B2B e-invoicing obligation: dates + source per milestone."
• "Which compliant products support Dutch, French and English?"

What this Actor does

• Follows the official portal per language (nl, fr, en): the news list, all FAQ subpages and the software-solutions article. Each page yields title, source date (<time datetime> from the CMS), normalised body text (hash input) and an effective date when the source itself states one. Note that the portal spans two official domains — most pages live on einvoice.belgium.be, the Dutch FAQ pages on efactuur.belgium.be — and every record reports the domain it actually came from in bron.
• Reads the official XLSX without a spreadsheet service: it resolves the file through the portal's own link (the filename carries a date, e.g. …-26062026.xlsx), reads sharedStrings.xml + the first sheet, and maps columns by header name so a column reorder cannot break it. The FPS publishes the same list in three languages with three different filenames and three different header names (Company name / Naam van de onderneming / Nom de l'entreprise) — all three are mapped, and language values (Dutch;French;English / Nederlands;Frans;Engels) are normalised to ISO codes.
• Follows the Peppol register and maps the 8 table columns by name, so Accai Software's AP Certified status is machine-readable instead of copy-pasted. 64 of the 726 providers are registered for Belgium.
• Change detection across runs through a named key-value store (be-einvoice-change-monitor-snapshot, L15). Every record gets a wijzigingstype and, when something changed, the concrete fields: kanOntvangen: false → true.
• Conservative effective dates: effectiefVanaf is only filled when a trigger word (vanaf / as from / since / à partir / obligatoire …) and a date occur in the same sentence. No guessing, no LLM interpretation.
• Short evidence, not a page copy: each document record carries a bronfragment of at most fragmentLengte characters (default 200). The full page text is never delivered — see Legal.
• Polite and fault-tolerant: honest user agent, serial requests with the Crawl-delay: 2 that the portal's robots.txt asks for, retry with backoff on 5xx/429 only, and per-source fault isolation — a failing source never crashes the run and never overwrites the stored state.
• Never bypasses a login, CAPTCHA, paywall or robots.txt rule. It also refuses to interpret the rules for you: it reports what the official sources publish, nothing more.

Quick start

Paste one of these into the input and run. Start small (10 records ≈ $0.05) to explore.

1. What changed in the rules? (the classic monitor run, for a schedule):

{ "bron": "portaal", "talen": ["nl", "en"], "alleenWijzigingen": true, "maxDocumenten": 25 }

2. Full current rule set, all three languages (ad-hoc / agent use):

{ "bron": "alle", "talen": ["nl", "fr", "en"], "alleenWijzigingen": false, "maxItems": 200 }

3. Which compliant software is available in Belgium?

{ "bron": "softwarelijst", "alleenBelgischeBtw": true, "maxItems": 400 }

4. Only the Peppol service providers for Belgium:

{ "bron": "peppol", "alleenServiceprovidersVoorBelgie": true, "maxItems": 100 }

For a scheduled run keep the input identical every time. Change-detection compares the current run with the stored state, and switching languages or bron mid-flight would make an entire source look "removed". The Actor detects that itself (scope signature) and then simply does not report removals.

Input

Field	Type	Default	What it does
bron	alle | portaal | softwarelijst | peppol	alle	Which source(s) to follow. The software article is always fetched, because it is also the page that links the official XLSX.
talen	array of nl | fr | en	["nl","fr","en"]	Portal language versions to follow. Each language costs extra source requests.
alleenWijzigingen	boolean	false	false = full current state with a change label per record (best for a single call or an AI agent); true = only new/changed/removed records (best for a schedule).
nieuwsPaginas	integer 0–3	1	How many news-list pages to walk per language. 0 skips news entirely.
maxDocumenten	integer 1–300	40	Cap per category (news, FAQ) per language.
sinds	date (optional)	—	Only deliver portal documents whose source date is on or after this day. Not applied to software/Peppol records (they have no publication date).
fragmentLengte	integer 0–400	200	Cap of the literal excerpt. 0 = no excerpt.
alleenBelgischeBtw	boolean	true	Keep only Belgian VAT numbers in the software list (≈300 of 469 rows).
alleenServiceprovidersVoorBelgie	boolean	false	Keep only Peppol providers with country Belgium.
contactgegevens	boolean	false	Also deliver contact names/e-mails. Off by default: those are personal data (GDPR).
crawlDelayMs	integer 0–30000	2000	Minimum pause between source requests (robots.txt asks for 2 s).
maxItems	integer 1–5000	1000	Total record cap for the run.

Output

One dataset item per followed document, per software row and per service provider. The three record kinds share one core, so a single dataset works for a compliance feed:

{
  "recordSoort": "software",
  "bronId": "BE0693727271|EENVOUDIGFACTUREREN|eenvoudigfactureren.be",
  "bron": "softwarelijst-fps-finance",
  "bronUrl": "https://einvoice.belgium.be/sites/default/files/uploads/Lijst software leveranciers/123-e-invoice-software-26062026.xlsx",
  "isOfficieleBron": true,
  "titel": "Eenvoudigfactureren (EENVOUDIGFACTUREREN BV)",
  "wijzigingstype": "inhoud",
  "wijzigingsdetails": ["kanOntvangen: false → true"],
  "contentHash": "560efc04…",
  "eerderGezienOp": "2026-09-18T08:12:44.001Z",
  "vastgelegdOp": "2026-09-25T16:36:13.181Z",
  "bedrijf": "EENVOUDIGFACTUREN BV",
  "btwNummer": "BE0693727271",
  "isBelgischeBtw": true,
  "applicatie": "Eenvoudigfactureren",
  "kanVerzenden": true,
  "kanOntvangen": true,
  "kanVerwerken": true,
  "verzendenVanaf": null,
  "ontvangenVanaf": null,
  "talen": ["Dutch", "French", "English"],
  "urlEindgebruiker": "https://eenvoudigfactureren.be/"
}

A portal document record instead carries taal, documentSoort (nieuws / faq / artikel), publicatiedatum, effectiefVanaf, bronfragment and contentHash of the page text:

{
  "recordSoort": "document",
  "bronId": "https://einvoice.belgium.be/en/news/period-tolerance-during-first-three-months-2026",
  "bron": "einvoice.belgium.be",
  "taal": "en",
  "documentSoort": "nieuws",
  "titel": "Period of tolerance during the first three months of 2026",
  "wijzigingstype": "nieuw",
  "publicatiedatum": "2025-12-18",
  "effectiefVanaf": "2026-01-01",
  "bronfragment": "Introducing compulsory e-invoicing between Belgian enterprises liable to tax as from 1er January 2026 is an important step in the digitalisation of our economy."
}

Change types

wijzigingstype	Meaning
nieuw	Portal document seen for the first time by this monitor.
toegevoegd	New row in the software list or new Peppol service provider.
inhoud	Text or row data changed — wijzigingsdetails names the fields (kanVerzenden: false → true).
datum	Only the source date changed (a CMS re-publish without a text change).
verwijderd	Row or provider no longer present in the source list.
bron-weg	Portal document disappeared from the listing.
onveranderd	Identical to the previous run (only delivered when alleenWijzigingen is false).

Use cases

• Compliance feed for a finance department: run nightly with alleenWijzigingen: true and post the wijzigingssignaal records into Slack/Teams. No more "did the FPS change anything?".
• Software selection for an ERP migration: filter the software list on kanOntvangen / kanVerwerken and ontvangenVanaf, and watch which vendors add capabilities.
• Supplier/partner due diligence: check whether a vendor's product is on the official list, which Peppol authority certifies them, and from which date they claim to be ready.
• Regulatory timeline for audits: collect the effectiefVanaf dates the portal itself states, with the source link and excerpt per milestone.
• Agent alerting: hand the dataset to an agent with a rule like "alert when wijzigingstype is inhoud and effectiefVanaf changed".

Legal and source terms

Belgian and EU public sources are covered by different rules, so this Actor is deliberately conservative:

• einvoice.belgium.be (FPS BOSA) — robots.txt allows content pages and asks for Crawl-delay: 2 (the Actor's default). Its general conditions state that the texts on the site may be reproduced at no cost for non-commercial use only. A paid Apify Actor is commercial, so this Actor delivers metadata plus one short excerpt (max 400 characters, 200 by default) and never the full page text. Images and videos on that site require written permission and are not used at all.
• The FPS Finance XLSX is a public data file linked from the official article. It is used as row data (vendor, VAT number, capability flags, dates) — the workbook itself is not republished. The list is published per language; the Actor reads the version of the first language in talen and covers all three.
• peppol.org has an open robots.txt and publishes factual register data. Contact names and e-mail addresses are personal data under the GDPR and are only included when you set contactgegevens: true.
• Not used, on purpose: the Belgian State Gazette (ejustice.just.fgov.be) because its robots.txt disallows /eli/ and /cgi/; financien.belgium.be because it sits behind a bot-check; EU e-invoicing / VAT-in-the-Digital-Age registers because they require registration. No alternative route is used to get around any of them.
• No advice. This Actor reports what official sources publish — dates, capability flags, change types and links. It is not legal, fiscal or accounting advice, and effectiefVanaf is only ever a date the source itself states.

Pricing (Pay Per Event)

Event	Price
document-record	$0.003 per delivered official portal document
software-record	$0.0035 per delivered compliant-software record
serviceprovider-record	$0.003 per delivered Peppol service provider
wijzigingssignaal	$0.01 per record that is new, changed, added, removed or disappeared

A full three-language portal run is roughly $0.10; a Belgian-only software snapshot is roughly $1.00. Start with maxItems: 10 if you just want to look around.

FAQ

Does this tell me whether my company is compliant? No. It reports what the official sources publish. Nobody — neither this Actor nor the excerpt it delivers — draws a compliance conclusion for you.

Why is the excerpt so short? Because the portal's conditions limit reproducing its texts to non-commercial use. The excerpt (one short sentence) is evidence for the change; the full text stays with the source.

How do I avoid phantom changes? Keep the input identical between scheduled runs. If you change talen, bron or the list filters, the Actor recognises the different scope and stops reporting removals instead of pretending your sources vanished.

Why do I sometimes see the same product twice in the software list? The official spreadsheet contains a few repeated rows and a few different products that share a product name (for example Sage BOB and Sage Cloud Demat Invoicing). Every source row is tracked separately — never merged — so nothing is hidden and each row keeps its own change history.

What does kanVerzenden: null mean? The source answers "No, but will be possible in the future" or "No, that is not planned". That is not the same as a plain "No", and the Actor keeps the distinction instead of flattening it.

What happens when a source fails? Each source is isolated: the other two still deliver, the failures land in RUN_SUMMARY.bronfouten and the log. The stored state is then deliberately not updated — otherwise the next successful run would report everything from the failed source as verwijderd. The cost is at most one missed update.

Can it run without the KV store? Yes, but then every record is reported as nieuw on every run. Change detection needs the named key-value store that Apify provides per Actor.

Keywords

belgium, belgique, belgië, e-invoicing, einvoice, e-facturatie, facturation électronique, peppol, b2b, btw, vat, compliance, finance software, accounting, erp, invoice, monitor, change detection, official data, fps finance, bosa

Changelog

• 0.1 — Initial version: official portal (news, FAQ, software article) in NL/FR/EN, FPS Finance compliant-software XLSX, Peppol certified service-provider register, cross-run change detection with field-level details, conservative effective-date extraction, short source excerpts.

Related Actors

• Flanders Water Extraction Ban Monitor — another Belgian official-data monitor, useful as a template for the same "official source + change signal" pattern.