Invoicing a Lithuanian customer: what to put on it

If you invoice Lithuanian customers from abroad, the question that reaches you is usually about format: a client asks for an "e-invoice", or a tender names a platform you have never heard of. Format matters less than you would think. What decides whether your invoice is booked in minutes or sits waiting for an email exchange is a handful of details on the document itself.

What your customer's accountant actually needs

None of this is a legal requirement. It is the difference between an invoice that goes straight through and one that generates a question:

• •Both VAT numbers, and a clear statement when the supply is reverse charged – the single most common reason an invoice comes back with a query
• •The currency, stated unambiguously: your customer books in euros at the official accounting rate for the transaction date, so a bare "$" is an avoidable delay
• •Line-level detail instead of one lump sum – quantity, unit price and VAT treatment per line
• •Whatever reference their side needs to allocate the cost: order, contract or project number, delivery site, vehicle registration. If you know it, print it
• •A layout that stays the same month to month. Automated accounting copes with almost any format; it copes badly with one that changes every quarter

Most of these are things you already know and simply don't print, because your own accounting doesn't need them. Adding them costs one change to a template.

With a recurring supplier, agree it once

For a one-off invoice, the receiving accountant will just fix it by hand. For a supplier who bills every month, that same fix is not one error — it is twelve a year, each costing the same half hour. This is the cheapest thing on the list and the only part no software can do on your behalf.

In practice one email covers it: print both VAT numbers, name the currency in letters, and include the customer's order or contract reference. Suppliers almost always agree, because on their side it is a single template change.

The one case where an e-invoice really is mandatory

Invoices to Lithuanian public-sector buyers — ministries, municipalities, state-owned companies, hospitals, schools — must be sent electronically through the state platform, SABIS. This has applied since 1 July 2024, and there is no PDF fallback: an emailed invoice to a public buyer will not be accepted.

For a foreign supplier this does not mean buying Lithuanian software. SABIS is connected to the Peppol network, so if your billing system or service provider already sends Peppol invoices to any other EU country, it can reach a Lithuanian public buyer too. You will need your customer's identifier and, in almost every tender, the contract or order reference they specify.

Selling to a Lithuanian business rather than a public body, you need none of this: Lithuania has no B2B e-invoicing mandate, and a properly detailed PDF sent by email is fully legal for your customer to book and reclaim VAT from. When a Lithuanian company asks you for an e-invoice anyway, it is a preference — usually because their own accounting is automated — not a legal requirement.

What changes before 2030

The EU's VAT in the Digital Age package was adopted in March 2025. The date that matters for cross-border trade is 1 July 2030: from then, intra-EU business-to-business transactions must be invoiced in a structured electronic format, with the data reported to tax authorities within a short window. Alignment of the various national systems follows by 2035. Lithuania is separately scoping a domestic B2B mandate — 2028 is the year usually discussed — but as of August 2026 the legislation is not final, so nobody can tell you what the domestic format will be. Structured invoicing will become normal; rebuilding your billing in 2026 against a specification that does not exist yet will not help.

The receiving side is where the work actually is

If you are at the other end of this — an accountant or finance lead in Lithuania processing invoices from foreign suppliers — the mandate question takes a few minutes a year. The cost is in what arrives: several languages, several currencies, reverse-charge supplies that have to be marked correctly, and the same supplier's VAT treatment corrected by hand every single month.

That is the part Ezura takes over. Invoices arrive by email, the details are read from the document, amounts in another currency are converted to euros at the accounting rate for the transaction date, reverse-charge supplies are recognised and coded, and the supplier's registration details are checked against the registry rather than retyped. Your dimensions — projects, departments, sites — are assigned from the invoice content, and the prepared entry goes through to your accounting system.

The decisions and the audit trail stay with you — you review and approve. What disappears is the retyping, and the month-end pile-up that comes with it.