Peppol explained for accountants: the network, access points and getting connected
How does the Peppol network work? The four-corner model, access points and the Dutch Peppol Authority, plus what your firm arranges.
The short answer
Peppol is an international framework of agreements and a network for exchanging electronic documents, including e-invoices. It is governed by OpenPeppol and works on a four-corner model: sender and receiver each connect through their own access point, and those access points deliver the messages to one another. Peppol matters to accounting firms for two reasons. Clients\' e-invoices increasingly arrive through it already, and in the study the Dutch Ministry of Finance commissioned on a possible domestic e-invoicing mandate, virtually all consulted parties preferred Peppol as the infrastructure.
Think bank transfers, not e-mail
The best comparison is a bank transfer. To send money, you do not need an account at the same bank as the recipient. You arrange your own bank, the recipient arranges theirs, and the banks settle the rest between them according to shared rules. All you need to know is the recipient\'s account number.
Peppol works the same way, but for documents. Sender and receiver each choose a service provider, the access point. Those access points speak the same language and deliver messages to one another. The sender only needs the recipient\'s Peppol address, usually an identifier such as the Chamber of Commerce number.
That is fundamentally different from e-mail. An e-mail with a PDF attachment can come from anywhere, can be altered in transit, and lands in an inbox full of other messages. Within Peppol, the sender is connected through a supervised party, the message is structured and validated, and delivery is confirmed.
The four-corner model
The network has four roles, hence the name:
- Corner 1: the sender. The business or firm that creates the invoice, usually straight from its own software.
- Corner 2: the sender\'s access point. Checks that the message meets the agreements and works out where it needs to go.
- Corner 3: the receiver\'s access point. Accepts the message and prepares it for delivery.
- Corner 4: the receiver. Gets the invoice in structured form in their own software, ready for processing.
Looking up the receiver runs through an address-book mechanism (the SMP and the Peppol directory): the sender\'s access point queries it to find out through which access point the receiver can be reached and which document types they accept. As a user you notice none of this, just as you never see how banks find each other during a transfer.
Access points and supervision: the Dutch Peppol Authority
An access point is a service provider that has been formally admitted to the network. In practice, the access point is often built into or connected to your accounting or invoicing software, so you do not need a separate contract. Do check, though: it matters whether your software vendor has arranged this or whether your firm still needs its own connection.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch Peppol Authority (NPA) supervises the access points. For firms, that supervision is a practical advantage: you do not have to assess the reliability of every link yourself, something you effectively cannot do with loose e-mail flows anyway.
The invoice standard: Peppol BIS Billing 3.0
Agreements on transport are not enough; sender and receiver also have to interpret the content the same way. For that, Peppol uses the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 standard, which is based on the European norm EN 16931. Every invoice travelling through the network therefore has the same structured layout: parties, lines, VAT breakdown and payment information sit in fixed, machine-readable places. A PDF sent by email does not meet that bar, even with a text layer.
The difference from e-mail and PDF
| E-mail with PDF | Peppol | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Free layout, readable only by humans or via OCR | Structured according to a fixed standard |
| Validation | None | Message is checked before delivery |
| Delivery | Uncertain (spam filter, wrong address) | Confirmed through the network |
| Sender | Unverified, phishing possible | Connected via a supervised access point |
| Processing | Retyping or scan-and-recognise | Directly machine-processable |
A PDF sent by e-mail is therefore not an e-invoice in the European regulatory sense, even if it contains a text layer. More on that distinction in Electronic invoicing.
What your firm arranges
For the firm itself
Start with your own invoicing. Can the firm send its own fee notes as e-invoices via Peppol, and is the firm itself findable on the network to receive invoices? A firm that uses it can explain it better to clients. Check with your software vendor whether the Peppol connection is included and whether it involves any fees or registration steps.
For clients
For the portfolio, three steps make sense. Take stock of which clients already receive or send e-invoices, for instance to public bodies or large customers. Make sure that clients you run in the firm\'s software can be registered on the network through that software; this is usually a setting, not a project. And decide per client group when to move them over actively, so you are not guiding everyone at once.
One expectation worth tempering: connecting to Peppol is not a major IT project. If the software supports it, it comes down to registering and testing per ledger. The real work lies in organising it across the portfolio, and that is exactly where a firm adds value.
Next step
Firms that run their clients\' ledgers in a single environment and want e-invoices to land directly in processing: Giroo Accounting.
Reviewed: August 2026. The setup of Peppol connections varies by software vendor; check the details with your own vendor.