What Is SABIS, and Who Must Use It in Lithuania?

SABIS — Sąskaitų administravimo bendroji informacinė sistema, or the General Information System for Invoice Administration — is Lithuania’s unified government platform for handling invoices to the public sector. It replaced the former E. sąskaita platform on September 1, 2024. Since January 1, 2025, Lithuanian public-sector bodies and other contracting authorities must receive the financial accounting documents required by law electronically, except for the cases set out in Article 22(12) of the Law on Public Procurement. The obligation applies with no minimum value threshold. That doesn’t mean every invoice between two Lithuanian companies now has to travel through SABIS: the rule only applies when the recipient is a government body, municipality, or other contracting authority. And SABIS isn’t automatically a manual portal you log into by hand. An invoice can reach the system through the Peppol network without the supplier ever touching the portal.

SABIS, E. sąskaita and Peppol Are Three Different Things

E. sąskaita was the system SABIS replaced. SABIS itself isn’t an invoice format. It’s infrastructure that brings three input channels together in one place: a portal, a universal interface fed directly from your accounting or ERP software, and the Peppol network. Peppol is the pan-European invoice-delivery channel, and inside SABIS it carries invoices in the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 format — a standardised structure that lets invoicing software from different countries and systems talk to each other without manual re-entry. Put simply: SABIS is the destination, and Peppol is one of the roads that gets you there.

Who the Obligation Actually Covers

The obligation is defined by who receives the invoice, not by where the supplier is based. If you sell to a Lithuanian government body, municipality, or other contracting authority, you fall under the rule regardless of where your company is registered, including Estonian and other foreign suppliers. If you sell to a private company instead, there’s no obligation at all. This is the point worth underlining for anyone assuming SABIS is a country-wide B2B mandate the way some VAT e-invoicing rules work elsewhere: it isn’t. It’s a B2G (business-to-government) rule, tied strictly to the buyer’s status.

Is There an Exemption for Small or Verbal Purchases?

No. Every invoice for goods, services, or works, including invoices issued under verbal or long-running verbal agreements, must go through SABIS regardless of the amount. The minimum value threshold that applied under the earlier regime doesn’t exist anymore. If your team has been treating small purchase orders or informal service agreements with a Lithuanian public buyer as exempt, that assumption no longer holds.

Three Ways to Submit, and What Foreign Suppliers Need to Know

Data reaches SABIS through one of three channels: entered manually in the portal or imported as an XML file, delivered through a universal interface straight from your accounting software, or sent via the Peppol network if your organization belongs to it, according to sabis.nbfc.lt. For companies outside Lithuania, the practical detail matters: foreign suppliers of goods, services, and works can’t get short-term direct access to the SABIS portal, per the same source. That leaves Peppol as the natural route in: pick an access point (a certified provider that connects your systems to the Peppol network) and route invoices through it instead of chasing portal credentials.

What Needs to Be in Place Before You Invoice Under a Written Contract

This is where a Peppol invoice can still stall, even in 2026. An invoice issued under a written contract goes through a check inside SABIS: the contract details need to already be registered in the system and linked to the specific seller, and the contract number shown on the invoice has to match the number registered in SABIS exactly, according to the SABIS FAQ. If that number doesn’t match, the invoice simply doesn’t go through. There’s no error message that fixes itself, no retry that helps. A technically flawless Peppol message won’t rescue an invoice if the underlying contract was never registered on the buyer’s side. The system’s updates are ongoing, which is one more reason to check your contract data in SABIS before the first invoice to a given contracting authority goes out, rather than after it bounces.