If you spend any time reading Swiss government IT documentation, you will encounter references to eCH standards — eCH-0010, eCH-0058, eCH-0069, and dozens of others. These numbers can look opaque from the outside. This post explains what the eCH organisation is, what its standards actually govern, and why they matter for anyone building or integrating with Swiss public sector systems.
What is eCH?
eCH is the Swiss association for e-government standardisation. It is not a government body, though it works closely with federal and cantonal IT departments. It is a membership organisation — members include federal offices, cantonal administrations, municipalities, universities, IT companies, and system integrators — that develops and publishes open standards for Swiss e-government applications.
The organisation was founded in 2002 to solve a coordination problem: Switzerland is a federal state with 26 cantons, each running its own IT infrastructure. Without shared standards, federal systems could not reliably exchange data with cantonal systems, and cantonal systems in one part of the country could not interoperate with systems in another. The eCH standards are the agreed-upon data formats, interface specifications, and procedural rules that allow Swiss public sector IT systems to work together.
eCH standards are voluntary by default — there is no law that automatically makes an eCH standard mandatory. However, many eCH standards have been incorporated by reference into federal ordinances and cantonal legislation, which gives them the force of regulation in those contexts. The federal IT strategy explicitly references eCH as the preferred standardisation framework for Swiss public sector applications.
How eCH standards are developed
The process follows an open, consensus-based model. Anyone who is a member of eCH (membership is open and not restricted to large organisations) can submit a proposal for a new standard or an update to an existing one. The proposal goes through a working group that includes relevant stakeholders — federal offices, cantonal representatives, software vendors, and subject-matter experts.
Working group meetings are documented, draft standards go through a public consultation period, and any interested party can comment. The final standard is published on the eCH website in German, French, and Italian, and made available free of charge.
Standards are versioned. When a standard is updated — to reflect a legal change, to address implementation issues, or to incorporate new requirements — a new version is published with a changelog. The transition from an old version to a new one is announced in advance, with a defined deprecation period during which both versions are valid.
The eCH numbering system
Each eCH standard has a number in the format eCH-XXXX, where XXXX is a sequential four-digit number assigned when the standard is registered. The numbers are not grouped by topic — eCH-0010 and eCH-0011 are related address standards, but eCH-0069 (e-invoicing) is not adjacent to eCH-0068 or eCH-0070 thematically. You navigate the catalogue by topic, not by number.
The eCH website maintains a searchable catalogue with each standard's title, current status, responsible working group, and download links. Standards can have the following statuses: in development, in consultation, approved and published, deprecated, or withdrawn. Only approved standards should be referenced in implementations.
eCH standards relevant to e-invoicing
Several eCH standards directly relate to e-invoicing and financial document exchange:
eCH-0069 is the main e-invoicing standard — it defines the data model and technical requirements for structured electronic invoices in the Swiss public sector. Version 4 is the current version and includes Swiss-specific extensions on top of the European EN 16931 baseline. It covers the UID field requirements, Swiss VAT codes, payment reference formats, and public sector budget reference fields.
eCH-0108 covers the exchange of order and despatch documents — purchase orders, order confirmations, and delivery notes — in the public sector context. It is relevant for suppliers to the federal administration who want to exchange the full procurement document set electronically, not just invoices.
eCH-0010 defines the Swiss address model — how postal addresses are structured for use in IT systems. This standard is referenced across many other eCH standards, including eCH-0069, for the creditor and debtor address fields on invoices.
eCH-0058 is the message acknowledgement standard — the technical protocol for confirming receipt and processing of electronic documents between government systems. While not directly an invoice format, it governs how sending systems receive feedback when documents are delivered to a government recipient.
How eCH standards relate to PEPPOL and SwissDIGIN
eCH standards and the SwissDIGIN PEPPOL profile are complementary rather than competing. They approach Swiss e-invoicing from different angles.
SwissDIGIN defines the Swiss implementation of PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 — it tells you exactly how to format a PEPPOL invoice for a Swiss recipient, including the Swiss-specific field requirements. SwissDIGIN is the operational standard: you use it when you are generating and sending PEPPOL invoices.
eCH-0069 defines the broader data model and requirements at a higher level of abstraction — it is the reference standard that federal and cantonal procurement policies are written against. When a federal ordinance says "invoices must conform to eCH-0069", the practical implementation of that requirement uses the SwissDIGIN PEPPOL profile as the XML realisation.
In practice, an invoice that is valid against the SwissDIGIN Schematron rules also satisfies eCH-0069 requirements for PEPPOL-delivered invoices. You do not need to validate against eCH-0069 separately if you are using the SwissDIGIN toolchain.
eCH standards outside of invoicing
For context, the eCH catalogue covers far more than financial documents. Some widely referenced standards outside the e-invoicing world:
eCH-0160 governs the archiving of electronic records by public sector bodies — directly relevant to how federal offices must store the e-invoices they receive.
eCH-0261 covers the electronic identity system (eID), increasingly relevant as Swiss public sector portals adopt identity-based authentication.
eCH-0147 is the standard for electronic file and document exchange between public authorities — the protocol underlying many inter-agency document transfers in Switzerland.
eCH-0185 covers the Swiss Unique Business Identifier (UID) in IT system contexts — the technical specification for how the UID is formatted and validated in electronic documents.
Why this matters for private sector companies
Most private companies will never read an eCH standard directly. But they matter indirectly in two ways.
First, if you supply the Swiss public sector, the procurement system you are delivering invoices to is built against eCH standards. Understanding what those standards require — particularly eCH-0069 for invoices — helps you understand why specific fields are mandatory and why certain validation rules are enforced. It is not arbitrary; each requirement traces back to an administrative need documented in the standard.
Second, eCH standards increasingly influence the broader Swiss IT landscape beyond the public sector. Swiss ERP vendors implement eCH address formats because their clients include both public and private sector organisations. The UID format defined in eCH-0185 appears on private sector invoices because the same standard is used across the economy. The standards are designed for government but their influence extends wherever Swiss organisations exchange structured data with each other.