What is Peppol?

Interested in learning more about Peppol and exactly what it's all about? As a part of eInvoicing Week 2022 DSPANZ held a live on 16 August for attendees learn about the network from those currently operating in the Australian and New Zealand market as well as European providers.

This webinar went beyond the basics and covered what's currently happening in the Peppol network on the global and local scale. We touched on:

Brief history of Peppol
Peppol basics
What's happening across the world
How you can get involved in Australia and New Zealand

This webinar is aimed specifically at Digital Service Providers (DSPs) and businesses looking to learn more about getting involved with Peppol eInvoicing.

A copy of the webinar recording and materials can be accessed below.

Webinar Recording

Materials

Additional information:

Information on Singapore's InvoiceNow
Information on Japan eInvoicing
Information on eInvoicing for small businesses
Questions and answers from the webinar
Meet our eInvoicing Service Provider members
April 2021 recording of A-NZ Peppol Showcase

Speakers

Matt Lewis - Co-Chair DSPANZ Peppol Industry Committee & Founder and CEO Capability Wise
Matt Lewis is the Co-Chair of the DSPANZ Peppol Industry Committee, and the Founder and CEO of Capability Wise Pty Ltd, an Australian Technology Management and Digital Transformation Consultancy.

Matt has been working closely with government agencies and software companies over the past 15 years to introduce secure digital capabilities to modernise staff and customer experiences.

Matt has also worked closely as an advisor to the ATO, the global software industry and key standards bodies to transform the procure-to-pay lifecycle across the Australian and New Zealand economies.

Matt has a passion for business transformation through digital solutions and believes that success requires more than just great technology. Successful transformation requires a willingness to challenge the status quo at a strategic business level, supported by empathetic and ongoing engagement with the people involved in the operational day-to-day elements of the business.

Matt has a Bachelor of Computing and Commerce from the University of Tasmania, is active in the global standards community, and has over a decade of experience working with some of the country's most challenging IT environments.

Simon Foster - DSPANZ President & Co-Chair DSPANZ Peppol Industry Committee
Simon Foster is the President of DSPANZ and Co-Chair of the Peppol Industry Committee. Since becoming a DSPANZ Director in 2016, Simon has led the association's eInvoicing work and currently represents DSPANZ at a number of eInvoicing-related working groups.

Outside of DSPANZ, Simon has garnered more than 25 years' experience working for early stage and high growth technology startups, mid-size enterprises and multi-nationals. Working across a number of key roles over this time has allowed Simon to develop a significant understanding of the technology landscape, including specialist knowledge of data security, scanning and invoice transfer and the ERP and accounting ecosystem.

Webinar Q&A

Is there a timeline estimate for business eInvoicing right implementation?

As you may be aware the Business eInvoicing Right (or BER for short) was outlined in a consultation paper realised by Treasury in 2021.
Treasury has not provided any further update since publishing the consultation responses. However, it should be noted that eInvoicing adoption continues to progress without a legislated requirement. Notable announcements include go-live of eInvoicing with major suppliers including Bunnings and BOC Gas.

So for this platform to operate - does this mean that the Supplier and the Customer must both be Peppol members?

The Buyer and Supplier are known as Peppol Participants or End Users. They don't need to be members of OpenPeppol, but some may choose to become direct members to influence the direction of the Peppol Network. The Access Point Provider must be a Peppol Member.

Can you give an example of businesses using Peppol for ordering through to eInvoicing? What is the catalogue function?

When a purchase order is sent by a customer it becomes a sales order in the supplier's finance system. Since it is the same document, it is called "Ordering" to be generic and cover the business process. In Peppol, the Ordering Business Process also include a response message to confirm that the purchase order (PO) has been accepted or rejected.

Peppol publishes a Business Interoperability Specification (BIS) for each business process. These contain a description of the business process, its scope, example use case and details on how to implement.

The Catalogue BIS describes the main activities and use cases that it supports as:

Description of goods and services
Maintaining content of framework contract
Item comparison
Item dependency and composition
Description of packaging and storage requirements
TAX classification (e.g. for VAT, GST and Sales Tax)
Item instance description
Maintenance of catalogue

You can find a list of all the Peppol BIS documents on the Peppol website, aside from invoice and credit note which has a separate listing.

Is there any limit on the amount of data points that can be put through the Peppol network?

Documents sent on the Peppol network must conform to one of the BIS specifications. This ensure interoperability, as all access points work to the same specification.

Regarding the US, do you know if many US located entities can send Peppol invoices to Australian companies?

This is certainly possible, and some US companies are Certified Access Points (e.g. IBM). We are not aware of any US companies that are specifically sending to Australian entities at this time, and the focus of industry activity is on domestic and trans-Tasman trade.