What is a Peppol Access Point?

An Access Point is the certified provider that carries your invoice over the Peppol network. How the four-corner model routes a document, when you need one, how to choose a provider, and where Beliq fits alongside it.

A Peppol Access Point is a certified service provider that connects you to the Peppol network. It takes the electronic invoice you hand it, finds the recipient on the network, and delivers the document to the recipient’s own Access Point. You cannot put a document on Peppol without one, because the network only accepts traffic from providers it has certified.

Beliq is not an Access Point. It builds and validates the file that an Access Point then carries, which is the other half of the same job. If you arrived here asking whether you need to procure one, skip to do I need one.

Peppol is a document-exchange network governed by OpenPeppol, and an Access Point is the on-ramp to it. Three things distinguish an Access Point from an ordinary integration or an EDI connection:

• It is certified. A provider signs the Peppol Service Provider Agreement with a Peppol Authority, which is a national body where the country has one and OpenPeppol itself where it does not. Certification is what lets the provider’s traffic onto the network at all.
• It speaks the network’s transport. Documents move between Access Points over the AS4 messaging profile, with each provider identified by a transport certificate issued for the network.
• It handles both directions. The same provider that sends on your behalf is normally the one that receives for you, and your inbound documents land in whatever inbox or API it gives you.

An Access Point is a delivery role, not a piece of software you install. What you buy is a provider relationship: they hold the certification, you get an interface to send and receive through.

Peppol routes on a four-corner model, and the two middle corners are the Access Points:

1. You (C1) hand your invoice to your Access Point, through its API, its portal, or your ERP’s built-in connection.
2. Your Access Point (C2) looks the recipient up, wraps the document in a Peppol envelope, and puts it on the network.
3. The recipient’s Access Point (C3) receives it and checks that it is a document type the recipient accepts.
4. The recipient (C4) gets it in their own system.

Two registries make step 2 work. Every participant’s capabilities and current provider are published in a Service Metadata Publisher (SMP), and the Service Metadata Locator (SML) is the lookup that tells a sending Access Point which SMP holds a given participant. So the sender never needs to know who the recipient’s provider is, only the recipient’s Peppol address. That indirection is the whole point of the network: you connect once, and you can reach everyone else who has connected once.

The envelope the network routes on is separate from the invoice inside it. It carries the sender, the recipient, the document type and the process, and the receiving Access Point routes on the envelope rather than on the invoice body. Beliq’s managed delivery builds that envelope from your document when it ships; today it is your Access Point that builds it.

A participant on Peppol is identified by a pair: a scheme from the official Peppol EAS code list, and a value under that scheme. 0208 plus a Belgian enterprise number and 9930 plus a German VAT number are both valid Peppol addresses. The scheme is what tells a receiving system how to read the digits.

Your Access Point registers that identifier in an SMP on your behalf, together with the document types you can receive. Until that registration exists you are not reachable, no matter how correct your invoices are. A participant identifier lives in exactly one SMP at a time, which is what makes changing provider a migration rather than a switch.

Beliq puts the same identifier into the document it builds for you. The scheme codes it accepts, and the countries where a VAT number is enough on its own, are on the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 page.

You need a Peppol Access Point when your invoice is meant to travel over Peppol. That is a question about the channel your counterparty or your mandate requires, not about your invoicing software.

When you do

The clearest case in Europe today is Belgium, where structured B2B e-invoicing runs over Peppol.

A three-month penalty tolerance ran to 31 March 2026 and has now passed.

Last verified against FPS Finance and the European Commission eInvoicing country page, including the Royal Decree of 8 July 2025 penalty scale and the tolerance window that closed on 31 March 2026 on 24 August 2026. Official source.

Public-sector invoicing in Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark also runs over Peppol, so selling to a public body in those countries means reaching it through the network. The mandate calendar has the dates and the channel for each country Beliq covers.

When your software already is one

Many ERPs and accounting platforms embed a certified Access Point, or resell one under their own name. If yours does, it is your Access Point and you do not procure a second one. Check before you buy: the question to ask a vendor is whether they are themselves Peppol-certified or route through a partner, and which countries and document types their registration covers. You might still use Beliq for validation and for the formats your platform does not build natively.

When Peppol is not in the picture

Not every mandate routes over Peppol.

• In Germany, domestic B2B invoices can travel point-to-point, and emailing a ZUGFeRD or Factur-X PDF to your counterparty is a valid delivery path with no Access Point involved.
• France routes through a certified platform, the Plateforme Agréée (PA), rather than a generic Peppol Access Point.
• Italy, Spain and Poland each run a national channel of their own.

In all of these Beliq still builds and validates the file; what carries it differs. See the Germany and France guides.

When you are only receiving

Inbound Peppol arrives through your Access Point’s or platform’s inbox, so receiving still means having a provider and an SMP registration. What it does not mean is a second integration project: if you just need to read what lands there, Beliq parses it into canonical fields, and the receiving on-ramp stays your platform’s concern.

OpenPeppol publishes the list of certified service providers, and the Peppol Directory lets you check whether a given business is already reachable on the network. Beyond that, the questions that separate providers are operational rather than technical:

• Which countries and document types does their registration cover? Invoices and credit notes are the common case, but orders, despatch advices and the Belgian e-reporting layer arriving in 2028 are separate document types with separate registrations.
• Do they register and maintain your SMP entry, or is that yours to run?
• Is receiving included, and how does it reach you? An API, a webhook and a portal inbox are very different amounts of work on your side.
• What are the terms for leaving? Migrating a participant identifier to another provider’s SMP is normal and supported, and how much friction it carries is a contract question worth asking before you sign rather than after.

Pricing models differ enough that we do not publish comparisons of them here. What we will say plainly is that the delivery relationship and the correctness layer are separable, and pricing one should not decide the other.

An Access Point’s job is delivery. Most will refuse a document that breaks the network’s own rules, because the network requires that of them, and that check is real. What it is not is a check against every ruleset you answer to:

• The Peppol rules are not the national rules. A document can be a valid Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 file and still fail the German or French ruleset that applies to the same transaction, and it is the authority’s ruleset that decides whether the invoice is accepted.
• The formats outside Peppol are outside its scope. XRechnung to a German buyer, Factur-X to a French one, and a hybrid PDF for a counterparty who wants to look at the invoice are all still yours to produce.
• Rules change on the authority’s calendar, not the network’s. Each ruleset versions independently, and a bump you did not follow ships rejected invoices quietly. See ruleset versioning.
• A verdict is not a receipt. “Delivered” tells you the document arrived. It does not tell you which ruleset version it was judged against, or give you anything you can show later. That is what verification is for.

A correct invoice that never arrives is useless, and a delivered invoice that fails validation gets rejected. You need both halves. This is the same boundary described in scope: generate and validate are live at Beliq today, and today the sending is yours. Managed delivery is in build, targeting Q4 2026 and subject to certification, and it runs that second half over a certified Access Point rather than turning Beliq into one.

Today you bring your own connector: choose the Access Point you trust, and Beliq pairs with it. Nothing in Beliq forces your document through a particular network or vendor, and managed delivery stays provider-independent when it lands, with certified networks selected per destination and kept interchangeable.

Being honest about the limit of that freedom: switching Access Points later is not frictionless, for the SMP reason above. What Beliq guarantees is that it never forces itself into that path, so your choice of provider stays yours and is never dictated by us.

• Peppol BIS Billing 3.0: the document an Access Point carries, and the electronic-address schemes per country.
• Scope: what Beliq does and does not do, and where the transmission boundary sits today.
• Beliq vs. a network bundler: the providers that fold validation into the network you route through.
• Mandate calendar: which countries are live, on what dates, and how each is carried on the wire.
• POST /v1/parse: turn a received invoice into canonical fields.