Automate Peppol with an Integration
Lesson 22 of 22 7 min read
How a Peppol Integration lets invoices flow from your finance or ERP system without manual entry, and what each of its settings controls.
Creating invoices by hand in the Message Editor works well for a handful a month. Once volumes grow, you'll want invoices to flow from your finance or ERP system straight onto the Peppol network. That's done with a Peppol Integration, configured like any other Integration. This lesson explains the flow and walks through its settings so you can follow a conversation with the Supply Lens team about it.
The automated flow
Inside Supply Lens the invoice is a Document of type Invoice, and a Mapping routes it from
your finance Integration to the Peppol Integration. Returning the delivery status to the
finance system is an optional extra, scoped per project.
Which documents a Peppol Integration handles
| Document type | Direction | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice | Sent and received | Received invoices are accepted as Invoice by default. |
| Credit | Sent and received | Received credit notes are accepted as CreditNote by default. |
| Order | Received only | Sent to you by trading partners, never generated by Supply Lens. Follows the Peppol BIS 3 Ordering profile. |
| Order Acknowledgement | Sent only | Called an order response in Peppol. Generated in reply to a received order; never imported. |
Shared settings
These apply to Invoice, Credit, Order and Order Acknowledgement Configurations.
Decision: which Peppol profile do outgoing documents follow?
| customizationId | The Peppol BIS customisation ID written on outgoing documents. It states which Peppol BIS profile and customisation the document conforms to, for example the BIS Billing 3.0 identifier. |
|---|---|
| profileId | The Peppol BIS profile ID written on outgoing documents, identifying the profile used for the exchange. |
| namespaces | Optional overrides for individual XML namespace prefixes on outgoing documents. Only list the ones you want to change. |
Peppol BIS (Business Interoperability Specifications) are the published document profiles everyone on Peppol follows. The defaults are right for most businesses: change these only when a receiver needs a different profile.
Decision: when, and with what checks, are documents imported?
| lastImportDate | A system-managed bookmark of the most recently imported document. Don't edit it. |
|---|---|
| importDelay | How long to wait before importing a document, so other systems can finish changing it. For example 00:05:00. |
| disableExpectedPayableTag | Turns off the check that the calculated document total matches the expected amount. Leave it on unless there's a reason. |
Per-document settings
| receiveDocumentTypes (Invoice) | The Peppol document types accepted for import. Default Invoice. Change only if a partner sends a non-standard invoice format. |
|---|---|
| receiveDocumentTypes (Credit) | Default CreditNote. |
| receiveDocumentTypes (Order) | Default Order. Change only if a partner sends a non-standard order format. |
| addTagsToNote (Order Acknowledgement) | Document tags to append to the note on the order response. Each entry picks a set of tags and says how their values are combined: an optional prefix, a prefix separator, and a separator between values (one per line if none is given). This is how the supplier's explanation of its decision travels on the order response. |
Good to know
Because order acknowledgements are outbound only, their receiveDocumentTypes defaults to an
empty list and is hidden from the configuration screen.
Ashby Joinery automates
A year on, Ashby sends forty council invoices a month and is tired of retyping them. With the
Supply Lens team they connect their accounting system as an Integration and add a Peppol
Integration with an Invoice Configuration set to Send. A Mapping routes invoices from the
accounting Integration to Peppol. The default customizationId and profileId suit the
council, so nothing changes there. Ashby's office manager now only steps in when an invoice
needs attention.
Recap
- A Peppol Integration lets invoices flow from a finance or ERP system to the network without manual entry.
- Invoices and credits can be sent and received; orders are received only; order acknowledgements are sent only.
customizationId,profileIdandnamespacescontrol which Peppol BIS profile outgoing documents follow.receiveDocumentTypessets which Peppol document types are accepted for import, with sensible defaults.addTagsToNotecarries the supplier's decision explanation on an order response.
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