Peppol
More info
- Owner
- OpenPeppol
- Released
- 2008
- Type
- Network and specifications for e-business documents
- Website
- peppol.org
A European network for e-invoices and orders where sender and receiver each only have to connect to an access point of their own.
The name originally stood for Pan-European Public Procurement OnLine, an EU project launched in 2008 so suppliers could invoice public bodies in other countries. Since 2012 it has been run by OpenPeppol, a Belgian non-profit. The design is known as the four-corner model. The sender hands the invoice to its access point, which looks up the receiver's access point in a central registry and delivers over AS4. The invoice follows Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, a UBL flavour of the European standard EN 16931.
Legislation drove the uptake. In Sweden the public sector has had to accept e-invoices since April 2019, and Belgium made Peppol e-invoicing mandatory between businesses from 2026. The PDF invoice with a reference number to retype by hand is nonetheless stubbornly alive.