Peppol Network

Peppol provides a standardised way to exchange electronic business documents between buyers and suppliers, both domestically and across borders. Document exchange takes place through Peppol Access PointsCertified service providers that connect businesses to the Peppol network, handling the secure sending and receiving of electronic documents, which connect trading partners to the network.

Maventa is a certified Peppol Access Point, registered in the Peppol network as Visma Software International AS. By integrating with Maventa, you can offer Peppol connectivity to your customers.

How Peppol exchange works

Peppol uses a four-corner model. The sender (C1) hands the document to their Access Point (C2), which looks the recipient up in the network’s address registry to find out which Access Point serves them and which formats they accept. C2 then transmits the document to the recipient’s Access Point (C3), which passes it on to the recipient (C4).

When you send through Maventa, Maventa is C2. You interact only with your own system and the Maventa API — everything from C2 onwards is handled for you. The same applies in reverse when your customer receives: Maventa is C3, and you collect the document from Maventa.

What Maventa handles for you

A certified Access Point is only required to do three things: send and receive Peppol documents, validate them against the Peppol Schematron rules, and register participants in an SMP.

Peppol membership carries considerably more than that. Access Point certificates have to be rotated every 24 months, every registered company has to be verified annually against public business registries, transaction and end-user statistics have to be reported to OpenPeppol, and an annual eligibility test suite has to be passed to stay compliant. Maventa handles all of it — none of it reaches your integration.

On top of the compliance work, Maventa adds a layer that keeps traffic flowing when the network does not behave:

Sending invoices via Peppol

Sending invoices through the Peppol network does not require separate registration. Maventa customers can send invoices to Peppol recipients the same way they send invoices through any other network.

To send an invoice via Peppol, provide the recipient’s Peppol address and set PEPPOL as the operator.

Peppol addresses

A Peppol address is the recipient’s electronic invoicing address within the Peppol network. It consists of two parts:

• Identifier prefix — indicates the type of identifier used. The prefix varies by country. See the official Peppol participant identifier scheme code list for details.
• Company identification number — uniquely identifies the company (for example, an organisation number).

For example, in Norway the prefix for organisation numbers is 0192. A Norwegian company with organisation number 123456789 would have the Peppol address 0192:123456789.

Recipient lookup

To check whether a company can receive invoices via Peppol, use Maventa’s Peppol participant lookup tool or the GET /v1/lookup/receivers API method.

The lookup confirms whether the recipient is registered in the Peppol network and returns their Peppol address and supported document types (such as INVOICE or CREDIT_NOTE).

For detailed instructions on using the lookup API — including parameters, request examples, and automatic routing — see the recipient lookup and routing section in the invoice sending guide.

Testing Peppol sending

The Maventa testing environment is connected to the Peppol test network, so Peppol sends are processed as real transactions within the test network. You can register one of your test accounts as a Peppol receiver — the registration is created in the Peppol test environment. Then send an invoice to that account from another test account to verify the full Peppol flow end to end. You can also use Peppol’s public test endpoints to send test invoices without needing a real Peppol recipient.

Format selection and conversion

You do not need to choose the output format yourself — Maventa selects it automatically based on what the recipient can receive:

1. SMP lookup — Maventa looks up the recipient in the Peppol SMP (Service Metadata Publisher) and retrieves the document formats they have registered to accept.
2. Format selection — Maventa picks a format that the recipient accepts and that Maventa supports. The formats Maventa supports in each market are listed on the country pages under Services & Reach. Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is the default and is used for all cross-border traffic. For domestic traffic — where the sender and receiver are in the same country — a national format is preferred when the recipient has registered one and Maventa supports it, for example XRechnung in Germany or SI-UBL in the Netherlands.
3. Automatic conversion — if the invoice is not already in the selected format, Maventa converts it before sending.

All invoices are validated against Peppol rules before transmission — invoices that fail validation cannot be sent.

For more information about Peppol formats, see the Peppol profiles and specifications.

When delivery does not succeed immediately

The Peppol network is not free of technical problems. A receiving Access Point can be down, a certificate can have expired at the other end, or a large payload can be rejected on the first attempt.

Maventa identifies these failure modes and retries automatically — around 20 attempts spread over two days — before reporting the send as failed. During that window the invoice stays in a sending state rather than failing, so there is no need to resend from your side.

Documents that hit a problem Maventa has not seen before are held in a quarantine area for investigation. In many cases the issue is resolved there and the document is delivered without the sender ever being involved.

Receiving invoices via Peppol

To receive invoices through the Peppol network, a company must be registered as a Peppol receiver.

Once registered, the company can receive electronic invoices from any sender connected to the Peppol network. The company’s details are published in the Peppol Directory, which serves as a shared address book listing all registered receivers, their supported document types, and format versions.

Document types

During registration, the company selects which document types it wants to receive:

• Invoices and credit notes — Registering with the INVOICE_AND_CREDIT_NOTE profile automatically registers both document types: Peppol BIS Billing UBL Invoice V3 (urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:Invoice-2::Invoice##urn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:3.0::2.1) and Peppol BIS Billing UBL Credit Note V3 (urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CreditNote-2::CreditNote##urn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:3.0::2.1). Some countries also support additional, country-specific formats that are included automatically. See the country-specific guides for supported formats.
• Self-billing — Companies that want to receive self-billing invoices can register an additional profile for self-billing invoices and credit notes.

Registering as a Peppol receiver

Once a company account has been created in Maventa and receiving is enabled (VISMA network), the company can be registered as a Peppol receiver by creating a Peppol profile.

Maventa registers the company in the Peppol SMPService Metadata Publisher — a registry that stores which organisations can receive documents via Peppol and how to reach them, which then synchronises with the Peppol Directory.

Register for invoices and credit notes

Call POST /v1/company/profiles with the following parameters:

• profile: INVOICE_AND_CREDIT_NOTE
• network: PEPPOL

After registration completes, the response includes the Peppol address the company was registered with.

To receive notifications when registration completes, register a webhook with the NETWORKS event type.

Use GET /v1/company/profiles to view active profiles for the PEPPOL network.

Register for self-billing

Call POST /v1/company/profiles with the following parameters:

• profile: SELF_BILLING_INVOICE or SELF_BILLING_CREDIT_NOTE
• network: PEPPOL

Use GET /v1/company/profiles to view active profiles for the PEPPOL network.

Remove a registration

To remove a company from the Peppol network, call DELETE /v1/company/profiles with the profile ID of the registration to delete.

Supported countries and identifiers

Maventa registers companies with the following identifiers (schemes):

Where a country has two options, the prefix follows the identifier used to create the company account in Maventa. An Estonian company created with a company code registers under 0191, and one created with a VAT number registers under 9931. An Estonian company cannot be registered under both. France and the Netherlands follow the same rule for choosing the prefix.

Poland and Italy are available to selected partners only, and both route domestic traffic through a national platform rather than Peppol. See e-invoicing in Poland and e-invoicing in Italy before registering.

Before registering

Before creating a new registration, check the company’s existing registrations with GET /v1/company/profiles:

• If the company is already registered through Maventa, no further action is needed.
• If the company is registered through a different Access Point, the previous registration must be removed before Maventa can complete the new one. The company needs to contact the previous Access Point to deregister.

Message Level Status (MLS)

Message Level Status (MLS) is a new Peppol message that tells the sending Access Point what happened to a document after it left the network — whether the receiving Access Point accepted it, rejected it, or could not pass it on to the recipient. It replaces the older Message Level Response (MLR).

MLS is exchanged between Access Points (C2 and C3), not between trading partners. As a Maventa integrator you do not send or receive MLS messages yourself — Maventa handles them on your behalf and reflects the outcome in the invoice status and events you already consume.

What changes for integrators

• Better failure visibility. Today a document that the receiving Access Point cannot pass on to the recipient can fail silently. MLS makes that case reportable, with a dedicated failed delivery reason.
• Faster feedback. From the end of the transition, Peppol enforces a service level on status turnaround: for documents under 10 MB, 99.5% of statuses must reach the sending Access Point within 25 minutes.
• MLR goes away. The MESSAGE_LEVEL_RESPONSE profile is being retired network-wide.

Timeline

OpenPeppol has published a phased rollout. The dates below come from the Peppol MLS Phase-In and Peppol MLR Deprecation and Phase-out plans.

MLS support is currently being implemented at Maventa, in line with the OpenPeppol timeline. No action is required from integrators — we will announce the release in the developer changelog, including what MLS-derived statuses look like on invoices and documents.

For the full specifications, see the Peppol eDelivery documentation.