If you own a small company and have recently found yourself facing three or four “mandatory” digitalisation requirements all at once — e-invoicing, electronic signature, GDPR, perhaps an EU funding deadline as well — you are not alone. The difference between companies that sort this out in a week and those that stall for months is the order in which they tackle it. This is the guide to that order.
Why the pressure is on right now
Three things lined up in the same year: mandatory e-invoicing has rolled out across the EU for B2B, B2G and, increasingly, B2C transactions, with real fines for non-compliant micro-enterprises; SME digitalisation grant programmes offer up to €100,000 per company, but with fixed implementation deadlines — which is to say, now; and the basic GDPR requirements (policies, documentation, cookies) remain a constant obligation, checked more and more often during inspections. This is not “digitalisation hype” — it is a concrete legal compliance list with real deadlines.
The right order to sort things out
Not all requirements are equally urgent, and some are a precondition for others. The recommended order:
| Step | What you sort out | Why in this order |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Qualified electronic signature | A digital certificate, the only legally accepted form for the tax portal | Without it, you cannot do step 2 |
| 2. Tax portal account + e-invoicing | Enrolment, invoicing software setup, testing | Mandatory, with real fines |
| 3. Automatic integration (if you have an online shop) | Automatic invoicing from WooCommerce/ERP straight into the tax system | Removes manual work and the risk of error |
| 4. Basic GDPR | Privacy policy, cookies, internal procedures | Can run in parallel with steps 1–3, but is checked often |
| 5. EU funding (if you want financing) | Grant application, then technical implementation | Has a fixed deadline — do not leave this step last |
What each piece means, concretely
The qualified electronic signature costs little (€39–79 for the certificate, plus €50–150 for setup), but without it everything upstream stalls — including access to the tax portal.
E-invoicing is no longer optional. Fines for micro-enterprises start at a few hundred euros, but the real cost is the time lost on manual invoicing, especially if you run an online shop with a daily order volume.
GDPR remains, for many small companies, a requirement handled superficially — a cookie banner copied from another site, without a real privacy policy or clear procedures for data erasure requests. During an inspection, the absence of documentation costs far more than doing it properly from the start would have.
SME digitalisation grants fund practically all of the above, plus management software, a business website or an online shop — but approved projects have fixed implementation deadlines. If you have an approved grant and still have no technical provider chosen, you risk losing the funding for administrative reasons, not budget ones.
The mistake we see most often
Companies treat each requirement in isolation — someone handles “just the invoicing”, someone else “just GDPR”, with nobody seeing the full picture. The result: the electronic signature expires without anyone noticing, the shop integration stays half automatic, and the GDPR documentation exists “somewhere” without having been updated for two years. Compliance digitalisation works best as a single project, with a single owner (internal or external), not as five separate tasks handed out at random.
What it costs, bundled, at PowerCart
| Package | What it includes | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Basic compliance | Electronic signature + tax portal account + e-invoicing setup | from €150 |
| Compliance + integration | + automatic invoicing from shop/ERP straight into the tax system | from €690 |
| Full compliance | + basic GDPR audit + documentation | priced after a short conversation |
All of it starts from the Digitalisation & e-invoicing package, usually delivered in 2–7 days for the basic part.
Where to start
If you do not know exactly what you already have right and what is missing, the fastest way to find out is not to read more, but to put the question to someone who sees this picture often. Request the free automation audit — in a 15-minute call we establish exactly what is compliant, what you are risking and in which order we sort out the rest, with a fixed price before we start.
And once compliance is ticked off, the logical next step is growth: an AI chatbot answering customers 24/7, or automations that remove repetitive work from the company — but those only make sense once the legal foundation is in order.