What Should I Be Looking For In A Peppol Access Point?

There are a number of different Access Points that are available across Australia and New Zealand, it can be difficult to accurately assess which Peppol Access Point is best for your business. We break down a number of areas that you should be considering when selecting your Peppol Access Point to enable Peppol e-invoicing.

Time to Value

Time to value is a very important aspect of choosing your access point and it can be influenced by a number of different variables, typically the biggest influencer into this is how long it takes to get fully connected to the Peppol network and successfully send your first transaction. You want this to be as short as possible based on your scope so make sure you are asking your access point what their time to value is likely to be and what process they use to ensure this happens.

Services Metadata Publisher

You want to ensure that your Access Point publishes your business details into the Peppol registry so that you are a listed sender and receiver. Not all Access Points offer this as a standard so make sure that you understand how this will happen if your access point doesn’t offer this.

Integration with Your Finance Systems

One of the more complicated parts of getting connected to the Peppol Network is the data connection from your Finance systems (either Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable) into the Peppol network. If you have IT integration resources available within your organisation you may be able to do this part yourself, some Access Point providers also provide data integration services as part of their offering so make sure you are clear what your access point provides and whether it meets your integration needs.

Translation of Data to and from Peppol bis 3.0

If you are able to integrate your data from your finance system you will also need to be able to translate the data from your finance system. For data going into the Access Point this will be from your finance systems format into a Peppol BIS 3.0 format. For data coming out of the Access Point, it will need to be translated from a Peppol BIS 3.0 to a format your finance system can ingest. Where you have IT integration resources available they may be able to do this work for you, if not some Access Point providers also provide this as a service. Again make sure you are clear on what your Access Point provider is providing and whether it meets your integration needs.

guidance on buyer and supplier enablement

Getting your organisation connected to the Peppol network is only half of the puzzle, to realise the full benefits of adopting e-invoicing you also need your buyers and suppliers to be enabled into the network as well. Some access point providers have expertise in the most effective ways to onboard your buyers and suppliers once you are connected to the Peppol network, which can make a huge difference in making sure you realise the cost savings associated with Peppol e-invoicing.

support for all e-procurement and e-invoicing documents

As the popularity of Peppol e-invoicing continues to rise, it’s important that you are future-proofing your solution so that it can grow with your volume but also evolve as the technology evolves. One of the exciting opportunities that the Peppol network offers is the ability to more deeply integrate with each of your customers and suppliers. Sending important business documents electronically for more than just invoicing and enabling true, touchless processing.

To prepare for this, one of the unique features of our Peppol Access Point Service is that we support a wide range of business documents out of the box. This includes the following processes and business documents:

• Billing processes:
  • Invoices
  • Credit notes
  • Invoice acknowledgements
• Order processes:
  • Orders
  • Order responses
• Fulfilment processes:
  • Advance shipping notice
• Sourcing processes:
  • Product/service catalogues
  •  Product/service catalogue responses
• Shopping cart processes
  • E-commerce punchouts – where a shopping cart is filled on a suppliers e-commerce website but the transaction is finalised in your system.