EHF (Elektronisk Handelsformat) is the Norwegian implementation of PEPPOL BIS 3.0 Billing — the European standard for B2B/B2G electronic invoicing. All government agencies in Norway (DFØ) require EHF on invoices over NOK 5 000. This guide walks through how to issue valid EHF, what the recipient sees, and how to integrate with the DFØ Access Point.
EHF is a structured XML document (UBL 2.1) that contains invoice data in machine-readable format. The difference from PDF is that the recipient's accounting system can parse EHF directly without OCR — vendor, amount, VAT per line and due date are fields, not pixels. This eliminates manual entry and scanning.
PEPPOL is a 4-corner model: sender's Access Point → SML (Service Metadata Locator) → recipient's SMP (Service Metadata Publisher) → recipient's Access Point. In Norway DFØ is the largest AP, while private players like Tickstar and Visma offer their own AP services. Addressing happens via org.nr.
Mandatory fields: invoice ID (UNIQUE), issuance date, due date, supplier and buyer org.nr + address, invoice lines with EAN/article number where applicable, VAT rate per line (25/15/12/11.11/0 %), total amount gross and net. If the invoice refers to a purchase order, the PO number must be included (DFØ may reject without it).
Top 3 errors: (1) The recipient is not registered in SMP — use PEPPOL Lookup before issuance. (2) VAT coding does not match UBL specification — use standard codes S/E/Z/G/AE/K. (3) Attachments (PDF/CSV) exceed 5 MB — use URL reference to hosting instead. All of these are caught before delivery if you validate against the DFØ schema.
Talk to us about how the 4b2b ecosystem fits into your existing Altinn process. We have implementations from 50-employee firms to OBX-listed companies.
