SwissDIGIN is not a company or a government agency. It is a community-driven initiative that defines how structured e-invoicing works in Switzerland — specifically the Swiss extension of the PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 standard that governs B2B and B2G e-invoicing in this country. The standards it produces are openly published, freely usable, and maintained through working groups that anyone can join.
If you work in finance, IT, or compliance at a Swiss company, or if you build invoicing software, understanding how SwissDIGIN operates — and how to engage with it — matters. The decisions made in those working groups directly affect what your systems need to support.
What SwissDIGIN actually does
SwissDIGIN defines the Swiss PEPPOL profile: the set of rules, field mappings, and validation constraints that extend the European PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 standard to cover Swiss-specific requirements. This includes:
- How the Swiss UID (Unternehmens-Identifikationsnummer) is represented in invoice XML
- Which Swiss VAT rates and categories are valid and how they map to EN 16931 tax codes
- How Swiss payment terms, QR-bill references, and IBAN fields are structured
- Schematron validation rules that check Swiss-specific constraints beyond what the base PEPPOL standard requires
The output of this work is a published specification, a set of validation artefacts (XSD schemas and Schematron files), and guidance documents that software vendors and companies implement. Everything is publicly available on the SwissDIGIN website and versioned on GitHub.
SwissDIGIN also contributes back to the OpenPEPPOL community. When a Swiss-specific requirement has broader applicability — or when the base PEPPOL standard needs to change to accommodate Swiss practice — SwissDIGIN representatives raise this in European working groups. This means Swiss participation in the local standard also influences the European baseline.
Who participates
SwissDIGIN participation is open to:
Software vendors building ERP, accounting, or invoicing software for the Swiss market. They have a direct interest in clear, stable specifications — ambiguity in the standard translates directly into interoperability problems and support costs. Vendors who participate can raise issues they are hitting in implementation, propose clarifications, and review draft specifications before they are published.
Large buying organisations — corporations, public sector bodies, and utilities that process high volumes of inbound invoices. These organisations want the standard to reflect the data fields they actually need for automated processing. Their input on fields like purchase order references, delivery addresses, and cost centre codes helps ensure the standard is usable in practice, not just technically compliant.
Banks and financial infrastructure providers. The connection between invoicing and payment means SIX, cantonal banks, and payment service providers have a stake in how invoice data maps to payment instructions. Bank participation ensures that the invoicing standard stays aligned with what the payment network can process.
Industry associations and public bodies. Organisations like Swiss federal procurement agencies, cantonal administrations, and sector associations (construction, healthcare, logistics) participate to ensure the standard covers their sector's specific requirements and that mandated formats stay consistent with operational reality.
If you do not fall neatly into one of these categories but work on e-invoicing in Switzerland — as a consultant, an independent developer, or within a company that cares about the standard — participation is still open. The working groups are not restricted to large organisations.
How the working groups are structured
SwissDIGIN organises its work through working groups (Arbeitsgruppen) focused on specific areas of the standard or specific industry sectors. There is typically a core technical group that owns the main specification and several sector-specific or topic-specific groups running in parallel.
Working group meetings happen regularly, usually every four to six weeks, and are conducted in German with documentation available in German, French, and English depending on the topic. The process follows a relatively standard open standards model:
- Issues or requirements are raised by participants or submitted via the public issue tracker
- The relevant working group discusses and proposes a resolution
- Draft changes go through a review period where any participant can comment
- Approved changes are incorporated into the next specification version
- A new version is published with a changelog and an announced transition period
The specification uses semantic versioning. Backwards-compatible additions (new optional fields, additional code list values) increment the minor version. Breaking changes that require implementation updates increment the major version. This matters for software vendors who need to plan update cycles around specification releases.
How to get involved
The most direct route is to sign up for working group participation through the SwissDIGIN website. You register your organisation, indicate which working groups are relevant to you, and get access to meeting invitations, draft documents, and the issue tracker.
If formal working group participation is more commitment than you want right now, there are lighter-touch ways to engage:
Submit issues. The SwissDIGIN issue tracker is public. If you have found an ambiguity in the specification, a validation rule that produces a false positive, or a use case that the current standard does not handle, filing an issue is the most direct way to get it addressed. Issues submitted with a concrete example and a proposed solution tend to move faster than abstract questions.
Review draft specifications. When a new version of the specification goes to review, feedback from implementers is genuinely useful. Running the draft validation rules against your real-world test invoices and reporting any unexpected failures is a contribution that takes a few hours and directly improves the published standard.
Attend public events. SwissDIGIN occasionally hosts open workshops and information days, particularly when a major version is being released or when a new mandate comes into effect. These are worth attending even if you are not a regular working group participant — they give you direct access to the people who wrote the standard and to other implementers dealing with the same questions you are.
Why participation matters even if you just implement the standard
It is tempting to treat standards participation as something for vendors and large organisations and not relevant if you are just implementing the standard for your own company's use. This underestimates how much implementation feedback shapes the standard.
The SwissDIGIN specification is improved when people who are actually trying to implement it in production systems report what does not work. A field that is technically optional but practically required for automated processing. A validation rule that is too strict and rejects invoices that are commercially valid. A code list that is missing a value your industry actually uses. These gaps only get fixed when implementers raise them.
If you have spent time working through SwissDIGIN field mapping or validating your invoices against the Schematron rules and found something that did not make sense, that experience is exactly the input the working groups need. The standard is open because the community that maintains it believes implementer feedback produces better specifications than a closed committee working in isolation.
The SwissDIGIN roadmap gives an overview of what is planned for upcoming versions — a useful read before deciding whether and where to get involved.