PEPPOL and Simplerinvoicing are often mentioned in one breath. But what is the difference?
PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online) is a European standard developed to make digital procurement easy for governments. To make this possible, PEPPOL uses a number of building blocks:
- A standard for the safe and reliable transport of documents between governments and suppliers.
- A number of document standards for digital procurement based on UBL. These include an invoice and an order, but also other documents, such as catalogues.
These PEPPOL standards are managed by OpenPEPPOL: a not-for-profit association (company form is AISBL) that is responsible for the management of the standards.
Any software package that wishes to exchange documents on the basis of the above standards can use these standards. However, they must then become members of a so-called PEPPOL Community. There are a number of PEPPOL communities in Europe. Most of them are organised nationally by a government. DIFI is an example of this, but the Belgian government has also set up a PEPPOL Community for the Belgian market.
Simplerinvoicing is also a PEPPOL Community that works on the basis of the PEPPOL standards. However, Simplerinvoicing is not aimed at a particular country and is not a government initiative, but a private sector initiative. The Dutch government is one of the initiators of Simplerinvoicing, but Simplerinvoicing is purely 'industry, for industry'. Simplerinvoicing is a non-profit foundation. The participants in Simplerinvoicing jointly determine the direction.
In concrete terms:
- Simplerinvoicing uses the PEPPOL protocol for the secure exchange of documents.
- Simplerinvoicing uses a B2B implementation of the UBL standards in which some B2B scenarios are better supported (SI-UBL).
- Simplerinvoicing also supports the standard PEPPOL invoice standards, so that Simplerinvoicing is 'compatible' with other PEPPOL Communities.
- In addition, Simplerinvoicing provides a number of additional services, including the use of the Simplerinvoicing SMP (the PEPPOL address book), so that software packages do not have to implement these themselves.
It is not possible for software packages to become direct members of PEPPOL; they always become members of PEPPOL via a PEPPOL Community.