Peppol is an open network for exchanging business documents. Instead of every company agreeing on a private format with every partner, each company connects to one provider and the network handles the rest.
The four-corner model
Corner one is the sender and corner four is the receiver. In between sit two access points: the sender's access point and the receiver's. Your software only ever talks to your own access point, which looks up where the receiver lives and forwards the document.
Participant identifiers
Every participant is registered under an identifier made of a scheme and a value, for example 0192:123456789. The scheme says what kind of number it is (a national business register, a tax number, a GLN) and the value is the number itself. Getting the scheme right is the most common reason first deliveries fail.
What travels on the wire
- A standardised document, most often a UBL invoice
- A transport envelope with sender and receiver identifiers
- A signed message-level response confirming receipt
Once you understand those three layers, debugging a failed delivery becomes a short checklist: is the receiver registered, did we use the right scheme, and does the document type match what they accept?