Peppol

What it means

Peppol is an international network for exchanging structured business documents: invoices, orders and despatch advices. It is the plumbing of electronic invoicing rather than a program: a company joins one access point and is reachable at its Peppol ID.

It carries no PDF and no picture. The document is XML built to a European standard, so the recipient’s system posts it without retyping. A QR code such as Pay by square solves the opposite end: a human paying, not a machine booking the document.

The network runs on a four-corner model: the sender, its access point, the recipient’s access point and the recipient. Each party deals only with its own provider. The network address is a company identifier, for example one derived from the tax ID, and it can be moved when the provider changes, so partners need not change anything.

How it works in practice

Unlike EDI, where the format and the connection are agreed with each partner separately, Peppol has one address register and one rulebook. Joining is done through an access point provider, not by integrating with every customer yourself.

Slovakia joined the network through the Ministry of Finance, and the state e-invoicing project builds on the same formats. A supplier bidding in public procurement has to expect invoices to travel as data, not as an attachment in an e-mail.

When setting it up for a client we first check whether their accounting software can load incoming XML invoices directly and match them to the supplier and the order. Only then do we configure the access point, because a network with no link to the books just moves retyping from paper to a screen.

What to watch out for

Being registered on the network is not enough. If nobody wires the access point into the accounting system and incoming invoices sit in a portal no one opens, the company claims its input VAT late and collects late-payment interest on documents it never saw.

With an e-invoice the tax document is the XML itself, not its PDF rendering. A company that keeps only the printout, while the original data eventually disappears from the provider’s portal, will struggle in an audit to prove the document’s authenticity and integrity. Document retention therefore has to include the original files.