Does Your ERP Support Peppol? What Ships Native and What Does Not

Before you buy an access point, check whether you already have one. A meaningful share of the mid-market has bought Peppol connectivity that duplicated something their ERP already shipped, and an equally meaningful share assumed "native support" meant every country when it meant four.

What ships native

The trap in the word "native"

Business Central is the clearest example of why the table above needs a second column.

Business Central does ship native PEPPOL format support. It also ships an E-Documents framework, and recent releases extended the purchase-draft preview to Peppol e-invoices. On paper it is covered.

In practice that native support targets a specific list of countries: Denmark, Germany, Belgium, and Australia/New Zealand. France is not among them, and France is the mandate that lands on 1 September 2026.

This is the general pattern, not a Microsoft quirk. ERP vendors ship the countries where the pressure landed first and where they have the most seats. "Does my ERP support Peppol" is the wrong question. The right one is "does my ERP support the specific obligation in the specific country where I trade."

The four questions worth asking

1. Which countries, specifically? Not "Europe". A named list.

2. Format or transport, or both? Germany mandates the EN 16931 format and no transport at all, so a ZUGFeRD generator plus email satisfies it and an access point is beside the point. Belgium mandates the Peppol network. France mandates certified approved platforms that are not Peppol. Poland and Italy mandate government clearance portals. We set out which countries mandate what in detail.

3. Which version and which deployment? Sage is the hardest to answer in the abstract because coverage varies by product line, version, and country. An on-premise instance several versions back is a different conversation from current cloud.

4. Does it handle inbound, or only outbound? The receiving obligation usually lands before the issuing one. Germany has required every business to be able to receive since January 2025. France requires it of everyone from September 2026. A module that emits compliant invoices but has nothing to say about the ones arriving has solved the later half of the problem.

If your ERP does not ship it

The realistic path is a white-label access point, reached over a REST API, rather than becoming a Peppol access point yourself. Self-certification requires ISO 27001 and OpenPeppol membership in order to provide transport that is already close to a commodity, which is a poor trade unless transport is your product.

For Germany specifically, you may not need an access point at all. A valid ZUGFeRD file, which is a PDF/A-3 with the XML embedded, sent as an ordinary email attachment, is compliant. That is the dominant German pattern and it is considerably less work than joining a network.

The half nobody ships

Every option above is about invoices leaving your business. None of it touches the orders coming in.

That gap is structural rather than an oversight. E-invoicing mandates are VAT law, and a purchase order creates no VAT event, so no tax authority has a reason to standardise one. Which is why a distributor in Belgium can have every outbound invoice flowing as structured XML over a managed network while the purchase orders that started those transactions still arrive as PDFs, emailed spreadsheets, and portal exports.

That inbound side is what OrderSync does: it reads orders in whatever shape they arrive and posts them into the ERP as structured orders, alongside whatever you use for invoice compliance.

Sources

• Electronic invoicing FAQ for Business Central, Microsoft Learn
• Peppol BIS specifications, OpenPeppol

Related reading

• European e-invoicing mandate timeline
• Peppol is not e-invoicing
• UBL vs X12 vs EDIFACT
• EDI Inspector, free in-browser EDI file reader