Peppol is an international network and set of specifications for exchanging electronic business documents, mainly invoices, between organisations through certified access points, using a common format based on the European standard EN 16931.
Peppol started in 2008 as a European public procurement project (Pan-European Public Procurement OnLine) and has been governed since 2012 by OpenPeppol, a non-profit association based in Belgium. Each country appoints a Peppol Authority that supervises the local service providers. The standard invoice format is Peppol BIS Billing 3.0.
Peppol relies on a four-corner model:
- Corner 1: the supplier, who issues the invoice from its own software
- Corner 2: the supplier's access point, which sends the document into the network
- Corner 3: the buyer's access point, found through a lookup in the Peppol directory
- Corner 4: the buyer, who receives the invoice in its own system
Peppol is the backbone of several national mandates. Belgium made B2B e-invoicing mandatory on 1 January 2026 with Peppol as the default channel, and Australia, New Zealand and Singapore use it for business invoicing. In France, the DGFiP became the Peppol Authority for France, and each approved platform must interoperate with at least one other approved platform. 79 French providers had signed with the French Peppol Authority by 22 December 2025.
Peppol transports an invoice reliably from one system to another. Peppol does not check that the invoice is commercially correct. Phacet works on the delivered data: supplier invoice validation compares each line with the order, the receipt and the agreed price, and duplicate invoice detection catches an invoice sent twice through two channels. The French regulatory frame is summarised in the e-invoicing mandate entry.
