What is Peppol and eInvoicing in Australia and New Zealand?

Peppol eInvoicing is an exciting new invoicing technology that is rapidly gaining momentum both in Australia and around the world. Peppol began in Europe around a decade or so ago as a project to standardise and facilitate the exchange of procurement documents within the EU, particularly around public procurement and government supply chains. However, since then it has grown to include not just B2G procurement but also B2B with companies e-invoicing each other as well as their government customers. It has since spread beyond Europe into Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand with many other countries now at various points of adopting Peppol as their national standard.
Peppol has 3 parts to it:
Part number one is OpenPEPPOL itself. OpenPEPPOL is a non-profit organisation established under Belgian law whose membership is made up of both public and private organisations all over the world. They govern the standards and the network that make up the other two parts of Peppol. OpenPEPPOL administers Peppol in multiple countries through the appointment of regional Authorities that are responsible for the administration of Peppol within each jurisdiction. In Australia, the Peppol Authority is ATO, and in New Zealand it's MBIE. The Authorities run an accreditation process to validate and certify which vendors can provide access point services to organisations within that jurisdiction.
Part number two is the Peppol document types. These are the specifications, requirements, and standards for the various e-procurement document types, of which e-invoicing is one. This includes the structure and rules around how e-invoices are formatted and what information they must contain.
The third part is the Peppol network, which is a secure network through which those documents are exchanged between training partners. Usage of the Peppol network can only be accomplished by using an Access Point to the network that is accredited by the Peppol Authority for that region. To use an imperfect analogy that’s perhaps becoming a little overused, the Peppol network is like using a cell phone. You can reach the person you are calling using a different handset to them, but each of you will require the use of a telco service before you can call each other. With Peppol invoicing you and your trading partner can have different finance systems, but you each need to use an Access Point service to e-invoice each other over the Peppol network.
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