Our Belgian government has decided that all invoices B2B should be sent over the PEPPOL network.
As we rely on a self-hosted ERPNext v14 for all our planning and administration, I need to figure out how to handle this. I’ve searched the forum and found a lot of info about the Indian e-invoicing implementation. Besides that, I’ve found a few German, Swiss, and Austrian posts, but looking specifically for PEPPOL does not return any valuable information.
Is there someone who could get me started to integrate e-invoicing by PEPPOL to ERPNext v14?
The language used and the aspects not expressed could suggest that it started as a government procurement digitization instigation, but is meant to mission creep into the whole economy, even beyond EU territory, complete with new “governance” bodies, digital “authorities”, certifications and whatnot to get people to voluntarily use it.
To illustrate, here’s an excerpt from the current german wikipedia article:
“Deutschland: „Der IT-Planungsrat verpflichtet Bund und Länder, mit Ablauf der Umsetzungsfrist der Richtlinie 2014/55/EU mindestens PEPPOL anzubieten, wenn sie einen Webservice zur Einlieferung von elektronischen Rechnungen zur Verfügung stellen.“[30] Die gesetzlichen Vorgaben verpflichten die öffentliche Verwaltung in Deutschland, E-Rechnungen ab dem 27. November 2018 zu empfangen und zu verarbeiten. Die Koordinierungsstelle für IT Standards (KoSIT) ist im Auftrag des IT-Planungsrats als PEPPOL Authority für Deutschland im PEPPOL-Netzwerk tätig.”
It seems to have started as a B2Gov, but these B’s might be required to have subcontractors also integrate this “network”. So that could be a big number of B entities and subentities for a start.
Is this already outdated or does it reflect the current situation?
Are businesses required to use an open data exchange format?
Or are they even required to do ALL their B2B, even if without any government procurement link, over a centralized API w/ servers, etc.?
The latter would sound like some kind of power grab, wouldn’t it? Not exactly typical for democracy and free enterprise, so I’d be astonished if this were the case.
The Belgian government has taken the decision that all B2B invoices should be sent via PEPPOL. They also make no bones about the fact that this is an obligation to minimise the discrepancy between the VAT received and the VAT that may effectively be charged. So you are correct that this is a way of gaining total control.
Of course, no one is talking about the cost of aligning all systems with this new law. Let alone the additional costs that may have to be incurred to intermediaries, and time for in-house staff training.
I don’t want to turn this post into a rant, but so I want to look for a solution. I am sure it is possible to meet the requirements through ERPNext. I fear I will need quite a bit of help from the community, though.
After all, it’s more like an add-on to invoicing (which has to conform to certain standards anyway), and then some API to a financial authorities’ server, which also needs configuration and some crypto keys which need to be properly secured in the ERP system.
Or maybe on some other communication system, for instance if your governmant does prescribe some special hardware box or so (like they do in the german health system where doctor cabinets are required to get such a system – see KIM | gematik, in german – for communication purposes; these boxen have their own security and privacy issues, unfortunately, although they are pushed with publicity claiming to solve such problems).