Featuring Max Söderlund, Partner Manager, and Sepideh Davoudi, Product Manager at Maventa
The build-or-buy question on e-invoicing rarely has a clean answer. Most SaaS companies that look at it carefully end up somewhere in the middle, building parts of the solution in-house and partnering for others. The useful question isn't whether to build or buy, but where to draw the line.
In Maventa's E-invoicing Masterclass for SaaS Leaders, Product Manager Sepideh Davoudi articulates a rule of thumb that works for most SaaS companies: build what differentiates your product, outsource what's necessary but commoditised.
What "differentiating" actually means in this context
The parts of your product that earn customers, retain them, or set you apart from competitors are the parts worth building in-house. For most SaaS companies, that means the user experience, the business logic specific to your product, the integrations that make your software valuable in your customers' workflows, the analytics layer, and any strategic control points like pricing or reporting models.
Applied to e-invoicing, the differentiating parts usually include the in-product experience customers see, the integration with your ERP or accounting logic, the way invoices flow through your platform, and the data and reporting layer your customers rely on. These are the parts where your team's effort creates lasting value for the business.
What "commoditised but necessary" means in this context
The other side of the line is the work that has to happen for your product to function, but where building it yourself doesn't make your product better.
For e-invoicing, we could take building a Peppol Access Point yourself as an example: this might include the Peppol certifications and their renewal cycle, regulatory updates and format changes, the security infrastructure (TLS, digital signing, encryption, certificate management), and the access point connectivity itself. These all have to work, but none of them differentiates your product. A customer doesn't pick you over a competitor because your certificate management is good.
This is the part of the build-or-buy decision where the case for partnering is clearest. As Max Söderlund, Partner Manager at Maventa, puts it after a recent conversation with a CFO who'd built their own access point: they thought they were building a connection, but in practice they'd built a department. The compliance, monitoring, incident handling, and regulatory updates turned an integration project into a permanent operational function. That permanent function pulls engineers and attention away from the work that actually differentiates the product.
How to apply this logic in practice
The line between differentiating and commoditised isn't always obvious at the start. Three questions tend to make it clearer.
1. Does this work create lasting value for your customers, or does it just keep the system working?
Lasting value should stay in-house.
2. Would building this in-house give you a meaningful advantage over a specialised provider?
A specialised provider that handles compliance, security, and certifications across multiple European markets has scale advantages that almost no individual SaaS team can match. If you can't build better than they can, partnering is usually the better call.
3. What's the long-term cost of owning this work, versus the cost of partnering?
Most SaaS teams that look at this honestly find that the long-term cost of building e-invoicing in-house is higher than the partnering cost, particularly once you factor in ongoing engineering time on compliance and operational tasks. The initial estimates almost always understate the maintenance load.
What this means for SaaS leaders
E-invoicing and e-reporting capabilities include a broad spectrum of questions to answer. Different parts of your e-invoicing capabilities can sit on different sides of the line, and treating it as one decision tends to push teams toward one end of the spectrum, when the real answer might be a mix. With both options, building and buying, there are always costs involved: it's how they add up that differs heavily.
For a full side-by-side comparison of building in-house, using basic gateway solutions, or embedding an e-invoicing API via a partner, see our build-or-buy comparison.
Frequently asked questions about build vs. buy for e-invoicing
When does it make sense to build e-invoicing in-house?
When e-invoicing infrastructure is core to your product's strategic differentiation, and when your team has the readiness to take on permanent compliance and security responsibilities. For most SaaS companies, neither of these is true. E-invoicing is critical but not differentiating, and the compliance maintenance burden sits a long way from the team's core expertise.
What parts of e-invoicing should SaaS companies keep in-house?
The parts that create competitive advantage. That typically includes the in-product user experience, the business logic specific to your product, ERP and accounting integrations, the data and analytics layer, and strategic control points like pricing and reporting. These are the parts where your team's effort produces lasting value for customers.
What parts of e-invoicing should SaaS companies outsource?
The parts that are necessary but don't differentiate your product. In the case of Peppol e-invoicing that might include Peppol certifications and renewal, regulatory updates and BIS changes, the security infrastructure underneath, and the access point connectivity itself. A specialised provider handling these across multiple European markets has scale advantages that most individual SaaS teams can't match.
What does the hybrid model look like in practice?
Most SaaS companies that work through the build-or-buy question seriously end up with a hybrid: building the parts that create competitive advantage (user experience, business logic, integrations, analytics) and partnering for the infrastructure underneath (Peppol Access Point, compliance, security). The hybrid model is the answer most cost-benefit analyses point to.
.png)
This blog post is based on a conversation in the E-Invoicing Masterclass for SaaS Leaders. Watch the full episode with Sepideh Davoudi on the masterclass hub.
Featuring
Max Söderlund, Partner Manager & Sepideh Davoudi, Product Manager
Available on
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
.jpg)
.jpg)