If you have only ever sent invoices as PDF attachments, Peppol looks like a detour: why route a document through two providers when e-mail already works? The answer is what arrives at the other end. A PDF has to be read by a person and retyped. A Peppol invoice arrives as data, lands in the recipient's accounting system, and needs nobody to copy anything.
This page is about the network itself — what it is, how a document crosses it, and what the terms mean. Whether you are obliged to use it is a separate question, and it depends on where you invoice.
What Peppol is
Peppol is an open network for exchanging electronic business documents. It started in 2008 as a European Commission project for public procurement, and since 2012 it has been governed by OpenPeppol, a non-profit association based in Brussels.
Two things make it unusual. There is no central server — no government portal every invoice passes through. And it is open: any provider that meets the rules can be certified, and any business can join through one. What the network standardises is the envelope and the language, not who carries the letter.
How Peppol works: the four-corner model
The network is usually described as a four-corner model. An invoice passes through four points, and you only ever see the first one.
| Corner | Who it is and what it does |
|---|---|
| Corner 1 — sender | You. You issue the invoice in your software and press send. |
| Corner 2 — sending access point | A certified provider that converts the document to the network format and passes it on. |
| Corner 3 — receiving access point | The provider your customer uses. It accepts the document and confirms delivery. |
| Corner 4 — recipient | Your customer. The invoice arrives inside their accounting system, already structured. |
Between corners two and three sits a lookup step most descriptions skip. Before sending, your access point asks the network's directory where the recipient lives and what documents they accept. That is what makes the model work without a central server: the addressing is distributed, and each participant is registered by their own provider.
For you this means you see corner one only. You issue the invoice, press send, and the rest is the providers' business. Your customer gets the invoice in their software rather than in an inbox where it can sink under everything else.
Peppol ID: your address on the network
Every participant has a Peppol ID, which works like an e-mail address for invoices. It is made of a scheme code and an identifier, written as scheme:identifier.
Which scheme applies depends on the country: some use the company registration number, some the organisation number, some the VAT number. The scheme codes are maintained centrally so that an identifier is never ambiguous across borders.
Three practical consequences:
- You do not apply for a Peppol ID. It comes into being when your access point registers you on the network.
- The ID is not the same thing as a VAT number, even in countries whose scheme happens to use one. Businesses that are not VAT-registered take part too.
- You can check whether a customer is reachable in the Peppol Directory at directory.peppol.eu. Listing there is voluntary, though, so an empty result does not prove absence. The real check happens on sending: if the recipient is not on the network, your software reports it back.
The format: Peppol BIS Billing 3.0
For software to understand software, the invoice has a fixed structure. The foundation is the European standard EN 16931, which defines what an invoice contains. Peppol adds the BIS Billing 3.0 profile, which tightens the standard and ties it to UBL 2.1 syntax. The result is an XML file your invoicing program generates. You never touch it by hand.
A few details worth knowing:
- A PDF can ride along. The profile allows a PDF preview to be attached, but the XML is the original — the PDF is for human eyes.
- No electronic signature is required. Integrity comes from the encrypted transfer between certified access points and from the delivery confirmation.
- Countries add their own rules. Many tax administrations publish national requirements on top of the profile. Your software applies them; you do not.
- It is not only invoices. Peppol also carries orders, despatch advices, credit notes and invoice responses. Which of those are actually used varies by country.
Where Peppol is mandatory
This is the part that changes fastest, so treat any list as dated the moment it is written.
The direction across Europe is consistent: e-invoicing towards public bodies came first and is now widespread, and a growing number of countries are extending the requirement to business-to-business invoices — each with its own start date, its own scope and, in some cases, its own national system alongside Peppol. The European Union's VAT in the Digital Age package pushes the same way for cross-border trade.
What that means in practice is simple enough: check the rules where you invoice, and check them again before a deadline you have heard about second-hand. What holds true everywhere is the shape — structured invoices, sent through a certified route, arriving as data.
What it costs and how secure it is
The network does not bill the businesses that use it. OpenPeppol charges its certified providers, and what reaches you is whatever your access point or software provider charges for the service — often bundled into a plan rather than priced per document.
Security rests on three things: connections between access points are encrypted, the providers are certified rather than self-declared, and delivery is confirmed back to the sender. That last point is the practical difference from e-mail, where a message that silently fails looks exactly like one that arrived.
Peppol in Lucanto
Plainly: Peppol support in Lucanto is in preparation, not finished. We are working on it and will say so here when it is live. What Lucanto does today is keep your invoicing data in order — correct customer identifiers, unbroken numbering, a document structure that already matches what the standard expects — which is the part that makes the move to e-invoicing straightforward when it comes.
If another tool promises you Peppol today, it is worth asking whether it is live or listed as coming soon.