Couldn't find any previous discussions on PEPPOL on HN. If you're unfamiliar with it, it is an electronic invoicing network, which the EU is starting to force on businesses. All business-to-business invoices in Belgium will have to be sent over PEPPOL as of next year [1]. Gone will be the days of emailing PDFs.
This obviously impacts every business which deals with other businesses. Access to the PEPPOL network is not free. Direct access is nearly impossible (it is expensive and requires technical audits). A variety of third parties are popping up to mediate access. They all seem complex and expensive. Not only will you have to use the network to send your invoices, you will also have to receive them somehow. If you're a small business, this could get pretty complicated pretty quickly.
I'm assuming we have some EU business owners/freelancers/entrepreneurs on HN. How are you preparing for this (apparently inevitable) future of PEPPOL?
[1] https://finance.belgium.be/en/enterprises/vat/e-invoicing/ma...
The gov't in Norway has mandated use of EHF for billing the gov't for about a decade now, which really drove adoption. Our customers has to have an agreement with one of the access points[3], so the cost of sending the EHF goes directly to the customer.
Adding support wasn't terribly hard, but it wasn't trivial either. The XML is fairly straight forward, but when you submit one the access point doesn't just do a schema verification, it also verifies that intermediate values are calculated and rounded correctly for example.
[1]: https://anskaffelser.dev/postaward/g3/spec/current/billing-3...
[2]: https://peppol.org/learn-more/country-profiles/norway/
[3]: https://anskaffelser.no/verktoy/veiledere/aksesspunkter-ehf-...