How to send a Peppol invoice

What you need at hand

A Peppol send is decided before the invoice exists. The network checks the document on departure, so a missing field means nothing leaves and you hear about it right away. That feels blunt compared with a PDF by email, and it beats a call from your customer's bookkeeper three weeks later.

Gather these items once. You will enter them on your first invoice only, after which they follow every document.

• Your company number exactly as it appears in the Belgian business register.
• Your registered address, the official one rather than the office you actually work from if they differ.
• Your IBAN, your payment terms and the credit period you grant.
• Your customer's company number, which acts as their address on the network.
• A VAT rate on every line, including exempt lines and reverse charge lines.

Sending, step by step

Let us walk through the five moves from the top of the page again, this time with what happens behind the screen.

Your company profile fills the header of every structured invoice. Activating your ID publishes your company number in the network directory, and from that moment any supplier can invoice you without you sending them anything.

Then comes the customer. Type in their company number, the software checks the directory and shows whether they can be reached. You build the invoice as usual, line by line, with the right VAT rate on each. When it is time to send, choose Peppol rather than email.

The document leaves in Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, a format your customer's software reads without human help. Seconds later, their access point confirms delivery. That confirmation is the only proof that counts, so make a habit of glancing at it before you move on.

• Allow twenty minutes for the setup, two clicks for every invoice after that.
• Nothing to install on your computer, it all happens inside your invoicing software.
• No paperwork with the authorities, your registration goes through your access point.
• You can still attach a readable PDF, but the structured file is the original.

Finding your customer's Peppol ID

Every business on the network has an address. In Belgium it is the company number prefixed with the code 0208, which simply says the number comes from the national business register.

So there is nothing to request from your customer. No account, no access code. Their VAT number is enough, and it already sits on the paperwork you exchange with them.

If the directory does not find them, there are two explanations. Either they have not switched Peppol on with their provider yet, or the number you typed has a digit wrong. Count the digits again before drawing conclusions.

Checking the invoice really arrived

A Peppol invoice moves through a few states before it lands with your customer. Knowing them stops you chasing too early, or worse, sending a duplicate.

In practice delivery is confirmed within seconds. A status still hanging after an hour deserves a look, though it is rarely serious. The network retries on its own when the access point on the other side is briefly unavailable.

When the network rejects your invoice

A rejection is nothing to worry about. It flags a missing or inconsistent field, and it lands immediately, before the document goes anywhere. You fix it, you send again, two minutes later it is behind you.

The causes fit on one hand, and it is nearly always the same handful.

• Customer company number missing, incomplete or mistyped.
• An invoice line with no VAT rate, often a discount or a travel charge.
• No exemption reason on a reverse charge or VAT free invoice.
• A malformed IBAN, or no bank account in your company profile.
• A due date earlier than the invoice date, usually a typo.

If your customer is not on Peppol yet

It still happens, mainly with very small outfits and with private customers, who fall outside the obligation anyway.

In that case the invoice goes out by email with its PDF, exactly as before. You enter nothing twice and change none of your habits. The day that customer joins the network, sending switches to structured on its own.

With Belgian business customers it is worth a word all the same. The obligation applies to them too, and a supplier who quietly points out that they cannot be found in the directory is doing them a favour.

Receiving, the other half of the job

Plenty of business owners set up sending and stop there. A shame, because receiving is where the real time saving sits.

A purchase invoice that arrives over Peppol drops into your purchase journal with the supplier, the amount and the VAT already read. You confirm the expense category and your deductible VAT is in place, without a single field retyped.

The opposite is expensive. If your tool cannot receive, supplier invoices get lost somewhere between two mailboxes, and it is your VAT deduction that suffers when the return is due.

Frequently asked questions