Electronic Delivery Notes by 1 October 2027: An Integration Plan for Companies with Warehouses and Fleets

There are two ways a company can satisfy a legal obligation. The first is to hire a person who satisfies it. The second is to build it into the system where the work already happens. The difference in cost is not one-off: the first is paid every month for as long as the obligation exists, the second is paid once.

With Serbia's electronic delivery note system, that decision is already on the table and the deadline is known.

What is in force and what is coming

Mandatory use began on 1 January 2026. That first phase covers public sector bodies (both receiving and sending), private companies supplying goods to the public sector, and anyone handling excise goods such as fuel, alcohol, coffee and tobacco. An amendment to the Law on Electronic Delivery Notes passed in December provides that, during the first six months of mandatory use, supervision will apply a high level of tolerance towards obvious unintentional errors. The tolerance applies to mistakes, not to the obligation to send.

The second phase starts on 1 October 2027. From that date both sending and receiving electronic delivery notes becomes mandatory in trade between private entities. The production environment is at eotpremnica.mfin.gov.rs.

If your company is not in the first phase, you have a little over a year. That sounds like enough time, and it is - but only if the first part of the work is not postponed, because the first part is not technical.

Why this is not the same job as e-invoicing

Companies that went through electronic invoicing often assume the delivery note is a smaller version of the same project. It is not, and the difference is operational.

An invoice is created once per delivery, in accounting, after the work is done, and its rhythm is monthly. A delivery note is created at the loading bay, in the warehouse, at 6:40 in the morning, before the truck leaves, and its rhythm is daily. The document count is typically several times higher, the documents originate outside the office, and they have to exist before the goods move.

So e-invoicing was a project for the accounting department. Electronic delivery notes are a project for operations. If you solve it by giving the warehouse operator one more screen to fill in, you have added a manual step at the narrowest point of the day.

What has to be clean before you send the first one

The longest part of this work has nothing to do with APIs. It is master data.

• Item master with units of measure that match what actually leaves the gate. If the system tracks pieces and goods leave on pallets, you will find out on day one.
• Partner register with correct tax and company registration numbers, and with delivery addresses rather than only registered offices. Goods are delivered to a site, a store, a plant - not to a head office.
• Loading and unloading locations as entities, including your own warehouses, plants and sites.
• Mapping between your item codes and the customer's codes, where the customer requires it.

There is no point automating a document while the same item carries three different codes in three systems. That work takes months, it is tedious, and it cannot be accelerated with money at the last minute.

Internal movements are often a bigger volume than sales

Companies with their own warehouses, plants, service operations or construction sites usually underestimate this part. Moving material from the central warehouse to a plant, from a plant to a site, from one group entity to another - all of these are movements of goods.

Those delivery notes should not be created by typing. They should be generated from a document that already exists: the work order, the material requisition, the loading order. Set up properly, the amount of manual work after implementation is lower than it was before.

Three architectures and when each makes sense

Manual entry on the portal. Sustainable up to a few documents a day. Below that volume an integration does not pay for itself, and that is a legitimate answer.

A provider or intermediary service that sends based on an export from your system. Quick to start, suitable for medium volume. The downside is that you keep maintaining code lists twice and errors only surface at the end of the chain.

Direct API integration from the system where the document originates anyway - WMS, ERP, or the scanner application in the warehouse. The only option that adds no human step.

The decision criterion is simple: documents per day multiplied by the number of locations they leave from.

The part most often overlooked: receipt and statuses

Sending a delivery note is not the end of it. The other side receives and confirms it, and the quantity they receive does not have to match the quantity you sent. Questions to settle before the system goes live:

• who monitors statuses and on which screen;
• what happens when a receipt is rejected or a quantity disputed, and who resolves it;
• how the carrier has access to the document during transport;
• how documents are stored and archived.

This is a process with an owner, not a field on a form. Companies that do not define it up front discover it through their first dispute with a customer.

A plan counted backwards from 1 October 2027

By the end of 2026. Clean up item, partner and location master data. The most tedious and longest part. Start here.

Q1 2027. Map the flows: which documents are created, where, by whom, and how many per day per location. This inventory determines the architecture, not the other way round.

Q2 2027. Integration and testing in the demo environment, running in parallel.

Q3 2027. Pilot in one warehouse or on one line, then roll out.

1 October 2027. Transition without adding a job.

A five-minute estimate of whether you need an integration

Take the average number of delivery notes you issue per day and multiply by four minutes, which is a realistic time for manually entering and checking one document.

Sixty delivery notes a day gives four hours a day. That is half a full-time position, permanently, every year for as long as the obligation exists. Compare that number with the one-off cost of an integration and the decision makes itself.

If you want this solved before the deadline

APPARO builds integrations of exactly this kind: connecting your ERP, WMS or warehouse application to the electronic delivery note system so that the document is generated automatically from an order that already exists, including internal movements between your own locations and legal entities.

We start with a flow inventory and an assessment of your master data, because that is where you find out whether this is a one-month job or a six-month one. That assessment is useful to you even if you build the integration with someone else afterwards.

Write to office@apparo.rs or book an intro call at apparo.rs/en/start-project.