Spain's e-invoicing puzzle — Verifactu, SII and the Crea y Crece mandate

If you sell into Spain, you've probably seen three scary words thrown around as if they were the same thing: Verifactu, SII and the Crea y Crece B2B e-invoicing mandate. They're not. They're three separate obligations that happen to overlap in time, and untangling them is the first step to not panicking.

The three rules, separated

• Verifactu (Royal Decree 1007/2023) is about *billing-software

integrity*. Your invoicing tool has to produce tamper-evident records with a chained hash, and either send them to the AEAT or keep them in a certified "Verifactu" format. It targets the software, not the VAT return.

• SII (Suministro Inmediato de Información) is *near-real-time VAT

ledger reporting* — registered businesses upload their issued and received invoice data to the AEAT within four working days. It's been live since 2017 for large companies and VAT-group members.

• Crea y Crece (Law 18/2022) is the B2B e-invoice mandate: business

customers must receive structured electronic invoices, not just PDFs.

Three different problems: software integrity, VAT reporting, and structured invoice exchange.

The dates (and the asterisk)

The honest answer is that Spain's calendar keeps moving, so treat any date as provisional and confirm with the AEAT or your gestor:

• Verifactu obligations are currently set to start for corporate

income-tax payers on 1 January 2026 and for everyone else on 1 July 2026. Software vendors had to be ready earlier.

• The Crea y Crece B2B mandate waits on its implementing regulation

(reglamento). Once that's published, the usual plan is large firms (turnover over €8M) about a year later and everyone else roughly two years later — so realistically phasing across 2026–2027.

If you only remember one thing: Verifactu is the near-term one; the B2B e-invoice mandate is the one still settling.

What this means if you're a foreign seller

Selling B2B into Spain from another EU country, your own invoicing is governed by your home rules, but your Spanish customers will increasingly expect a structured e-invoice they can ingest — not a PDF attachment. The practical move is to standardise on a structured format now (EN 16931 / UBL) so you're not re-tooling under deadline.

For cross-border VAT, nothing here replaces the basics: validate your business customers with VIES before applying the reverse charge, and keep your intra-community supplies on the recapitulative listing.

How Eurobillr helps you get ready

Eurobillr issues structured, EN 16931-compliant invoices over PEPPOL, runs the VIES check on your EU B2B customers at send time, and keeps your VAT figures from real documents rather than spreadsheets. That structured-first foundation is exactly what every one of Spain's three rules is pushing the market toward — so when the Spanish specifics land, you're adjusting a setting, not rebuilding.

We're tracking the AEAT rollout and will say plainly what Eurobillr does and doesn't cover for the Spanish national channel as the reglamento firms up — no vaporware promises.

Background reading: PEPPOL explained, EN 16931. In the app: send your first PEPPOL invoice.