Peppol inbound inbox: triage supplier invoices
How Belgian buyers receive structured supplier invoices on Peppol, triage the inbox, and get documents booking-ready without PDF re-keying.
Updated
One job: get supplier invoices booking-ready
Under the Belgian e-invoicing obligation, domestic B2B invoices arrive as structured Peppol documents, not as email PDFs. The inbound inbox is where those documents land after your Access Point receives them. Your job is triage: recognise the supplier, decide booking readiness, and clear exceptions before payment.
The XML is the authoritative invoice. A PDF preview, if present, is a human view only. See PDF versus structured invoice.
Daily triage workflow
- Confirm delivery - Document appears with sender participant ID, invoice number, amounts, and delivery timestamp.
- Match the supplier - Map scheme
0208enterprise number to your supplier master data. - Check booking blockers - Wrong entity, unknown supplier, duplicate invoice number, missing VAT breakdown, or amount mismatch vs PO.
- Route or book - Approve for accounting, hold for clarification, or reject with a structured IMR response when your process uses it.
- Archive with audit trail - Keep Peppol delivery metadata with the booked document.
| Inbox state | Meaning | Next action |
|---|---|---|
| Matched, clean | Supplier known, no duplicate, fields complete | Book / send to approval |
| Unmatched | Sender ID not linked to a supplier | Create or fix supplier record, then rematch |
| Held | Business question (price, qty, PO) | Clarify; do not book as final |
| Orphaned | Received at AP but not linked to your company/tenant | Admin routing fix before normal triage |
Failure modes that stall booking
Silent empty inbox. Suppliers cannot deliver if you are not discoverable. Confirm Peppol registration publishes receive capability for BIS Billing. No inbox traffic often means receive is not published, not "no invoices exist."
Wrong legal entity. Multi-company groups sometimes share an Access Point poorly. Invoice reaches the network endpoint but lands in the wrong tenant. Treat as orphaned until routing rules match KBO/BCE numbers.
Duplicate under a new Peppol ID. Same supplier, new Access Point or corrected participant ID, looks "unknown." Match on VAT/enterprise number, not only the previous Peppol endpoint nickname.
Credit note mixed into invoice queue. Structured credit notes are separate document types. Booking an absolute amount without checking document type creates inverted postings.
PDF-first habit. Staff wait for an emailed PDF and ignore the structured inbox. Under the mandate, the Peppol document is the one to process.
- Peppol inbound inbox
The reception queue where Access Point-delivered supplier invoices appear for matching, exception handling, and booking.