Peppol e-invoicing

Peppol is the network European businesses and governments use to exchange invoices as structured documents rather than as PDFs. Instead of an attachment somebody has to read and retype, the invoice arrives in your client's accounting software as data. Several countries now require it for business to business invoicing, and Temponia can send over it from the invoice you already made.

Temponia registers you as a sender. Invoices you receive from your own suppliers are not part of this: they keep arriving wherever they arrive today.

Turn it on

1. Open Company settings and go to the Invoicing tab.
2. Check that your company address is complete. Address line 1, Town, Zipcode and Country are all required, and enabling stops with a message if any of them is missing.
3. In the E-invoicing (Peppol) panel, select Enable e-invoicing.
4. Follow Verify your identity. This is a one-time identity check run by the access point, and sending is not active until it is done.
5. Refresh status re-reads your registration afterwards, so you can confirm the verification landed.

Your address on the network is worked out from your VAT number and country. There is nothing to look up. If you need to override it, the Peppol address section of invoice settings takes a scheme and identifier.

Prepare the client

An e-invoice has to be addressed, which means each client you send to needs more than a name:

• A VAT number and a Country. Together they produce the client's Peppol address, the same way yours is derived.
• A structured address: Street and number, Postal code and City filled in as separate fields. Address (free text) is not enough, because the recipient's software needs the parts separately.

Once a client has a VAT number and country, Temponia looks them up in the Peppol directory and shows a badge on the client: Reachable on Peppol or Not found in the Peppol directory. Not found does not always mean unreachable, but it is a good reason to check before sending. An invoice for such a client also carries a Client not found on Peppol label.

Send an invoice

Make the invoice as usual, then open it and select Send via Peppol. Temponia validates the invoice, hands it to the access point in the background, and shows the outcome as a Peppol: label on the invoice.

sent is the confirmation that the document left Temponia and was accepted by the network. There is no separate receipt from the recipient's software.

unknown happens when the access point does not answer in time. The invoice may or may not have gone out, so Temponia does not retry on its own. Check the outgoing documents at the provider before sending again; the button warns you about exactly this.

Sending also moves a Draft invoice to Sent, so you do not have to change the status by hand.

What changes once an invoice is sent

The transmitted document is the legal invoice, so its content may no longer drift from what the recipient holds. As soon as an invoice is queued, sent or unknown:

• The number, dates, due date, client, addresses, VAT rates and names are locked.
• The invoice lines can no longer be added, changed or removed.
• The invoice can no longer be deleted.

The status is still yours to change, so you can mark it paid. For anything else, issue a corrective invoice.

When Temponia refuses to send

Validation runs before anything leaves, and the message lists every problem at once. The usual causes:

• Your VAT number, address or country is missing from company settings.
• The client's country, structured address or VAT number is missing.
• The invoice has no number or no lines, or a line has no description.
• A line uses a discount. Discounts are not supported on e-invoices; fold them into a separate line instead.
• The invoice uses a second tax or compound tax. Neither can be expressed in the standard format.
• A 0% line goes to a client in another EU country without a VAT number. Zero percent across a border is reverse charge, and reverse charge needs the client's VAT number.
• A 0% line goes to a client outside the EU. That case is not supported yet.

Where the rules do apply, they are applied for you: lines to a VAT-registered client in another EU country are classified as reverse charge and the invoice carries the customary note about article 196 of the EU VAT Directive.

The document itself

Invoices are built as UBL 2.1 following EN 16931 and Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, with VAT totalled per rate the way the standard prescribes. Your IBAN from invoice settings travels with it as the payment account, and the due date goes along with its term written out (Net 30, Upon receipt). Sending first refreshes the seller and buyer details from your company and client records, so the PDF you keep and the document you sent agree.