Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 · rule

UBL-CR-039

Layer en16931·Checked against Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 2026.5

What does UBL-CR-039 mean? A UBL invoice should not include the BillingReference CreditNoteDocumentReference

Why did my invoice fail UBL-CR-039?

The UBL 2.1 schema allows a CreditNoteDocumentReference child inside cac:BillingReference, but this element is not part of the EN 16931 core invoice model, so a compliant invoice should not include it. UBL-CR rules exist because EN 16931 uses only a subset of full UBL: any element outside that subset carries data the receiver is not required to process. In the core model, cac:BillingReference conveys the preceding invoice reference (BG-3) and should be limited to cac:InvoiceDocumentReference with cbc:ID (BT-25) and optionally cbc:IssueDate (BT-26).

Official rule text

A UBL invoice should not include the BillingReference CreditNoteDocumentReference

Common causes

Your ERP or invoicing software exports the full UBL 2.1 BillingReference structure, including CreditNoteDocumentReference, instead of the EN 16931 subset
A generic UBL template or mapping copies every available source field into the XML rather than only the core-model elements
Data intended for another business term was mapped into cac:BillingReference/CreditNoteDocumentReference because no obvious core element existed for it

How do I fix it?

<cac:BillingReference>
  <cac:InvoiceDocumentReference>
    <cbc:ID>INV-2024-001</cbc:ID>
    <cbc:IssueDate>2024-05-01</cbc:IssueDate>
  </cac:InvoiceDocumentReference>
</cac:BillingReference>

Check your invoice against this rule

Paste it into the live demo, or call POST /v1/validate. See the quickstart.