Questions, including the awkward ones

It turns a Shopify B2B order into a structured e-invoice that meets EN 16931, in the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 UBL format. Each invoice gets a sequential number, is checked against the European and German rule sets before anything is sent, and then leaves over the Peppol network or by email. The record of all of that is kept for eight years.

No. Shopify produces order confirmations and PDFs, which is a different thing from a structured e-invoice. It cannot generate an EN 16931 document, address a buyer by their Peppol participant id, or transmit over a certified Access Point. That gap is the whole reason this app exists.

The admin screens are in English. The invoice itself is not: an invoice document is read by your buyer, so amounts and dates on it are formatted German-style and the PDF is built for a German reader. A German admin is on the list, not in this version.

From 1 January 2027, German businesses with prior-year turnover above 800,000 euro must send B2B invoices as e-invoices. From 1 January 2028 the rest follow. Receiving is a separate duty and it has already applied to every German business since 1 January 2025.

For Germany, email is enough. The German rule is a format obligation, not a transmission obligation: the BMF letter of 15 October 2025 is explicit that no channel is prescribed and that email, a portal or any channel the parties agree all qualify. So an EN 16931 document sent by email discharges §14 UStG. Peppol matters because buyers and other countries increasingly expect it, not because Germany demands it.

No. It emits Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 UBL only. Both XRechnung and ZUGFeRD are valid EN 16931 artefacts and both would satisfy the law, but XRechnung is a B2G standard that the ERechV imposes on federal contracting authorities, and it is not required for B2B. If you invoice German public authorities, Zeppol is not the right tool for that part of your business.

Not in this version, and it is worth being clear about why that matters. Your duty to be able to receive an e-invoice has applied since January 2025, and a plain email inbox satisfies it, so nothing is broken by Zeppol not doing it. Registering your company as the exclusive Peppol recipient in order to receive would break inbound delivery for any merchant already published by another provider, which is a worse outcome than not offering the feature.

One EN 16931 and Peppol BIS 3.0 pipeline serves Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. France, Italy, Poland, Romania and Spain are out of scope: they run national platforms (PDP, SdI, KSeF, e-Factura and Facturae) which are separate integrations, not a Peppol destination.

The order is marked as skipped rather than failed. A non-EU export is outside the scope of both Peppol and the EU e-invoicing rules, so no e-invoice is issued and nothing waits for you.

They are blocked rather than invoiced wrongly. This version invoices in euro only, and a non-euro order stops with a reason code instead of producing a document with the wrong currency on it.

Because handed over is the strongest thing that is true. A Peppol send is a signed, non-repudiable AS4 exchange between your Access Point and your buyer's, so a success means the receiving Access Point took legal custody. It does not mean the buyer opened the invoice, agreed with it or paid it. Peppol's own message-level status explicitly excludes business acceptance, and there is no delivery endpoint to poll. Any app that shows you delivered or accepted for a Peppol invoice is showing you something it cannot know.

The AS4 receipt id returned by the receiving Access Point, the channel, the timestamps of every state the invoice passed through, and the document itself. Zeppol's own timestamped record is the archive of record, not the receipt: Peppol signs the compressed payload, compression is not deterministic, and nobody keeps the compressed bytes, so a receipt cannot be re-validated against the document later. That is an open problem at the European Commission rather than a defect in any one vendor.

It stops before it is sent, and it tells you why in a sentence naming the field to change. A VAT number VIES rejected, a missing supply date, VAT charged on a sale that should have been reverse charge. There are 27 reasons and each one has a fix. Nothing is silently dropped. The full list is in the docs.

Not automatically in this version. A refund is a credit note, and Zeppol marks a refunded order as such rather than issuing one for you. You raise it yourself for now.

Recommand, operated by BRBX BV, certified as both an Access Point and an SMP under the Belgian Peppol Authority. Zeppol always builds its own EN 16931 UBL and routes every Access Point call through one internal port, so the supplier can be changed without changing the invoices.

VAT numbers and Peppol identifiers are treated as sensitive data and credentials are encrypted at rest. There is a data processing agreement under Article 28 GDPR, and the privacy page names the sub-processors. Write to [email protected] if you need something the DPA does not cover.