E-shot or online shot? The Finnish invoice difference

Short answer: the difference is the recipient, not the file format

In Finnish business language, these two words are separated by who receives the invoice, not by technology. E-shot normally means an invoice that arrives in a private person's online bank. Online invoice means a machine-readable invoice moving between companies and the public sector, landing straight in the recipient's accounting software. The State Treasury of Finland (Valtiokonttori) defines a web invoice as an invoice in machine-readable, that is structured, form, sent directly into accounting software or into an online bank. A PDF or image invoice sent as an email attachment is not an e-mail. So if a Finnish customer asks for an e-invoice, ask them for their e-invoice address and their operator identifier. The rest is plumbing.

The Finnish Tax Administration puts it from the other side: it describes a webcast as “e-sketch kaltainen”, an invoice similar to an e-invoice, but meant for companies and associations, while private persons get the e-invoice. Technically, both can travel in the same Finvoice format.

	e-mail	online invoice
Typical recipient	private person	company, association, public sector
Where the invoice ends up	online bank or another payment service	purchase invoice handling and archiving software, also the online bank
Machine-readable	yes (e.g. Finvoice)	yes (eg Finvoice 3.0, TEAPPSXML 3.0)
What must exist first?	the recipient's agreement in their bank to receive invoices	a contract with an operator and a web site
What Finnish law touches	not the focus of the net shooting act	public procurement obligation and the right to demand a structured invoice
Practical point	convenient payment	automating the entire purchase invoice process

The same technical invoice can be both

This is where most explanations go wrong. An e-lasku is not an “unstructured consumer PDF”, and a verkollasku is not some other file type. Finvoice 3.0 is an XML-based Finnish e-invoice format, and its the implementation guide says plainly that the format suits invoicing between companies of every size as well as consumer invoicing. The same guide defines a consumer e-invoice as a Finvoice invoice that the consumer receives in an online bank or another payment web service. The guide is a living document: its last dated change is 16 September 2025, when it was added that a credit note amount may also be zero.

One misunderstanding is worth pulling out by the root — an invoice in Finvoice 3.0 format is not automatically compliant with the European e-invoicing standard EN 16931 (the EU norm that defines what data a structured invoice must carry). The State Treasury stresses that both Finvoice 3.0 and TEAPPSXML 3.0 can be used to produce standard-compliant invoices, but it does not happen by itself. The responsibility lies with the sender, and some operators check compliance before passing the invoice on.

What does the recipient actually do with your invoice?

Think through two scenarios with the same €1,200 invoice to a Finnish customer.

If the customer is a company

The invoice travels through an operator into their purchase invoice system. From there it goes on an approval round, into the accounts, and into the archive. The State Treasury names one concrete benefit: the recipient can lift the reference number and the account number straight into the payment, so less time goes into sorting out payments. Your €1,200 doesn't sit in someone's inbox waiting for a person to retype the numbers.

If the customer is a private person

Here the logic is different. The invoice arrives in the online bank for payment and that's where their work ends. Writing about a project on one-off consumer invoicing, the State Treasury notes that with the solutions available on the market an e-invoice could not be sent directly to a consumer, because the consumer must first make an agreement in their bank with the invoice sender to receive invoices. For a one-off sale to a private person, the e-lasku is therefore not a channel you can just start using.

In the Finvoice transmission service both sides need a contract with their own service provider: the seller sends the invoice through their operator, and the buyer either imports it into their system or views it in a browser.

A PDF sent by email is not an e-mail

This is the most common misunderstanding between an Estonian seller and a Finnish buyer. A PDF invoice can be a perfectly correct invoice document: all the required details in place, VAT calculated correctly. It is still not a net shot. The State Treasury's page states it without conditions: e-mailin liitteenä ähtätavat pdf- tai kuvamuotois lasut ei ole verklaskakuja, meaning invoices sent as a PDF or image email attachment are not verklaskaskuja. A picture of an invoice gives the buyer no automation at all. Someone still has to type the data in.

So when a Finnish customer says "send a download" and you email a PDF, their request has not been met — in a larger organization, the invoice may simply come back.

When does Finnish law give the right to demand a structured invoice?

The Finnish netshot act is Act 241/2019 on the electronic invoicing of contracting entities and businesses. Three things in it are worth keeping apart.

First, the act defines an electronic invoice as an invoice that has been issued, transmitted and received in a structured electronic format allowing automatic processing, and that complies with the European e-invoicing standard and the listed syntaxes. A scanned image does not fit that definition.

Second, in public procurement falling within the scope of the procurement acts, Finnish contracting entities must receive and process e-invoices that meet the EN standard. That is an obligation on the buyer's side.

Third, a contracting entity and a business meeting the conditions have the right to require that an invoice be presented in structured electronic form. The act entered into force on 1 April 2019, and the provision granting that right has applied since 1 April 2020. The €10,000 figure appearing in this act is neither an invoice amount nor a VAT threshold. It belongs to the definition of a business and is based on financial-year turnover above €10,000.

What the act doesn't do

It does not turn every domestic Finnish business-to-business invoice into a mandatory online payment. None of the sources cited here sets out, as of 15 September 2026, a nationwide B2B obligation or a separate per-invoice fine. In practice, a large share of buyers requires a structured invoice by contract, not by law.

Do this when a Finnish customer asks for a net shot

The State Treasury's advice is simple: before sending, make sure the buyer receives e-invoices at all, and get their exact invoicing details. After that your operator takes care of the invoice arriving in the technically correct shape. In practice it goes like this:

• Establish the recipient type: private person or company. Everything else follows from that.
• Ask for the exact details: y-tunnus (the Finnish business ID), the online registration identifier (OVT identifier) and the operator identifier. Finnish recipients' details are collected in verkollaskuosoite.fi, which the State Treasury points to, but a large organization may have several addresses, so get confirmation from the customer directly.
• Check your own software: does it produce invoices that meet EN 16931, and is the operator connection switched on? If not, you need a separate contract with an operator.
• Build the structured invoice and send it through your operator, or through the buyer's own invoicing portal if they offer one.
• Publish your own details: if you want to receive a webcast from Finland, keep your address in the address registry and put it on your website too.

The Tax Administration shows how much address hygiene matters: if a company's online address is in the Tieke address registry, the Tax Administration sends the tax online automatically and you don't have to order it separately. The invoice arrives about three weeks before the due date, and it can be used to pay real estate tax as well as prepayments and back taxes. If you enter the address yourself in OmaVero, though, any later change has to be made there by hand as well. And if a self-employed person has no way to use an online payment, they can order an e-payment from the Tax Administration instead. In practice, the line between the two terms is crossable.

What changes before 2030

The European Union's ViDA package (VAT in the Digital Age, the VAT reform for the digital era) brings the definition of an e-invoice into line with what Finland already means by one. Council Directive (EU) 2025/516, adopted on 11 March 2025 and published on 25 March 2025, defines an electronic invoice for VAT purposes as an invoice in a structured electronic format allowing automatic and electronic processing.

The cross-border part comes later: Member States must adopt the necessary measures by 30 June 2030 at the latest and apply them from 1 July 2030. From that same moment the invoicing deadline shortens: for intra-Community supplies of goods and for those transactions where the buyer pays the VAT, the invoice must be issued within 10 days of the chargeable event.

The practical conclusion for an Estonian seller invoicing Finland: structured invoice data is becoming less of a choice and more of a precondition, and a ten-day deadline means the invoice has to come out of a process rather than out of a month-end scramble. That is also why it pays to write your Finnish customer's online shopping address and operator identifier onto the customer record today.

Also available in: in Estonian

Last reviewed: September 15, 2026

FAQ

What is the main difference between an e-invoice and an online invoice?

The main difference lies in the recipient and purpose of the invoice, not the file format. An e-invoice is mainly sent to a private individual's online bank for payment, while an online invoice is sent between companies and institutions directly to business software for automatic processing.

Is a PDF file sent by email a verkkolasku in Finland?

No, a PDF file or an image invoice is not an e-invoice. An e-invoice must be structured in a machine-readable format, such as Finvoice 3.0 or TEAPPSXML 3.0, which allows systems to read the data automatically.

What information should I ask a Finnish customer for to send an electronic invoice?

Before invoicing, Finnish business customers must be asked for their business ID, e-invoice address (usually an OVT ID), and operator ID. Based on these codes, the e-invoice operator correctly routes the document to the buyer's business software.