3 min readUpdated: Category: Compliance & Regulations
Format and Transport Are Two Different Questions
In projects, document formats and transmission channels are frequently conflated. XRechnung and ZUGFeRD describe how an invoice is structured in terms of content. They say nothing about how the document reaches the recipient. Legally, a simple channel like email is sufficient for domestic B2B invoices in Germany — in practice, it is the weakest, as it offers no delivery receipt, no address verification, and no standardized error feedback.
Peppol closes precisely this gap: a standardized network with binding technical profiles, verified participant identifiers, and acknowledged delivery.
The Four-Corner Model
Peppol operates on a four-corner model. Corner 1 is the sender, Corner 4 is the receiver. Positioned in between are two Access Points — service providers that inject messages into and receive messages from the network on behalf of their customers. Thus, sender and receiver do not need to agree bilaterally on how to exchange data; they each interact solely with their own Access Point.
Addressing is handled via a Participant ID — in Germany typically derived from a Leitweg-ID or an enterprise identifier. A central directory resolves which Access Point is responsible for an identifier and which document types the recipient can accept. It is this directory that makes Peppol far more robust than email: an unregistered recipient is flagged before transmission, not after.
Peppol BIS Billing and German Implementation Practice
The invoice profile used across the network is Peppol BIS Billing, an implementation of the EN 16931 standard. XRechnung is also an EN 16931 implementation. The two are compatible, but not identical: they differ in certain business rules and mandatory fields. Suppliers delivering to public sector entities typically use XRechnung along with a Leitweg-ID; those transmitting across Europe additionally require the BIS profile.
In implementation, this means the mapping layer must be able to generate both specifications from the same data source. To achieve this, we model an internal canonical invoice object and derive the target formats from it — avoiding duplicate maintenance whenever a format version is updated.
The Path to Your First Transmission
Onboarding follows five steps: select an Access Point, determine and register your participant identifier, enable document types and profiles, execute test transmissions with realistic documents, and finally go live with a defined fallback strategy.
The fourth step is almost always the most demanding. Test transmissions using sample documents run smoothly; errors only surface with real data — deviating tax codes, missing buyer references, units of measure not matching the code list, or rounding discrepancies between line-item and header totals. Therefore, plan for a realistic data extraction from your production system.
How OXORY Supports You
We integrate Peppol directly into the SAP billing process: generating the canonical document, deriving XRechnung or BIS Billing, validating against applicable business rules, transmitting via an Access Point, and returning the delivery status to a monitoring dashboard accessible to business users.
If you want to evaluate whether Peppol is the right approach for your recipient structure, a brief breakdown of your invoice recipients by country and type is usually sufficient to clarify the decision in a single conversation.
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