The name Peppol stands for Pan-European Public Procurement On-Line and started as a European initiative to simplify digital procurement across borders.
Today, it has grown into a global solution for document exchange between companies and governments.
Peppol consists of 3 components:
Both Peppol and EDI are technologies to exchange documents digitally between organisations and companies, but they are not exactly the same.
EDI means Electronic Data Interchange and has been around for decades to exchange documents without human intervention.
So you may actually think of EDI as a group name under which fall a lot of different formats and various networks.
Peppol can then be regarded as a kind of EDI, but there are still two important differences between Peppol and the classic EDI solutions:
Broadly speaking, you go through 3 steps:
When choosing your partner, take into account the 3 steps above: some parties only act as transporters. Amista guides you not only with the transport, but also with the format, validations, checks and approvals.
In technical terms, this is called the 4-corner model:
When invoicing to the government, you are required to provide electronic invoices in Belgium. The Flemish government has required this since 2017. The federal government is phasing in the obligation with every supplier having to deliver invoices via Peppol (or Mercurius) by November 2023.
For detailed information, please refer to this blog article: Blog: E-invoicing mandatory in Belgium
The price is largely determined by 2 aspects: what functionality do you need and how many documents do you want to send or receive?
The cheapest solutions only offer transport via Peppol without additional services such as mapping from/to Peppol format, validation of the message content, fallback via email if the customer is not available via Peppol, feedback messages, …
Overall, you can say that there is a one-off start-up cost to link your organisation and your systems with Peppol. In addition, you have a transaction cost for sending or receiving each message via Peppol.
Amista applies a degressive pricing model: as the number of invoices increases, the transaction cost decreases. If you want more information on pricing, feel free to get in touch.
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