Simplify Your E-Invoicing with Peppol Solutions

Peppol is an organization that publishes and maintains a set of rules and standards for the exchange of business information.

Peppol originated from a European project set up to design and facilitate eProcurement with government agencies. It soon became clear that the e-invoice message was the most important and impactful message from the process. The project evolved into a European platform for the exchange of electronic invoices with public companies. Companies saw the added value and wanted to extend Peppol's capabilities to other trading partners.

The biggest advantage of Peppol is that once you, as a company, are connected to the Peppol network, you can immediately exchange messages with any other party that is also connected to Peppol without any additional setup; and worldwide. By using status messages, you as the sender can also always be sure that your messages have arrived at the recipient.

A Peppol Access Point is a service provider that allows other companies to access and connect to the Peppol network. Companies wishing to send messages through Peppol must register through an Access Point anywhere in the world. All Access Points interconnect with each other to form the Peppol network.

The Access Point acts as the traffic controller, so to speak, relaying messages to the recipient's Access Point.

SMP stands for Service Metadata Publisher. Peppol SMP is a party that keeps a record of each recipient's address information on the Peppol network, what Access Point they use and what messages they can receive.

SML stands for Service Metadata Locator. Peppol SML contains the identification numbers of all receivers present on the network, as well as in which SMP the detail information can be found.

The availability of the SMP and SML are important components for the operation of the Peppol network. Indeed, parties must be findable in the SMP registry through the SML.

As a certified Service Provider, Descartes has its own SMP in addition to its own Access Point. Consequently, Descartes maintains a list of all parties registered as recipients through Descartes.

Each country provides its own Peppol authority that assumes responsibility for designating local Access Points.
The coordination of all appointments and management of the global network is done by OpenPeppol. They delegate some of their tasks to national authorities.

EDI can be used in all industries. We see that in some industries the use of EDI has been given an extra boost by standardization organizations, for example GS1 in retail and IATA A Peppol ID is the number with which companies are identified on Peppol. The application for a Peppol ID must be done via an Access Point and is based on official unique characteristics such as a KBO number in Belgium or the Chamber of Commerce number in the Netherlands. Without a Peppol ID you cannot exchange messages via Peppol. Descartes is a certified Peppol Service Provider and can handle the request for a Peppol ID if you want to communicate from your ERP to the Peppol network. This replaces manually entering invoices into another website that converts them to Peppol invoices.the air industry. Sometimes companies will also require their suppliers to engage in EDI. In addition, there are quite a few government agencies such as customs and port authorities that require declarations to be sent electronically via EDI.