Receiving Peppol documents in Belgium for your own company

This guide walks through everything needed to exchange Peppol documents for a company registered in Belgium, assuming you are setting up your own Belgian company, and that the company only receives documents over Peppol. Change any of the three answers at the top of the page to get the guide for a different situation.

What you are setting up

You are putting one company, your own or one you represent, on the Peppol network, so it can exchange invoices electronically with its customers and suppliers.

The setup is a one-time affair: registering the company and getting it verified takes a few minutes in the Recommand dashboard, and there is nothing to gain from automating something you do once. What you do integrate is the part that repeats: sending and receiving documents. Our existing integrations can also connect Recommand to accounting or invoicing software you already use, with no code at all.

A single team can hold several companies at no extra cost, useful if you run more than one legal entity, and the document volume of all of them counts towards one plan.

Peppol in Belgium

Belgium runs on the standard European Peppol stack, which makes it the simplest of all countries to start in. Documents are exchanged as Peppol BIS 3 UBL, over the standard Peppol billing process, and Recommand's own access point and SMP handle both directions.

What is specific to Belgium:

• The B2B mandate is already in force. Since 1 January 2026 Belgian companies must be able to send and receive structured electronic invoices for domestic B2B transactions. See what if I don't switch to Peppol for what non-compliance means in practice.
• Enterprise numbers are the Peppol address. Belgian companies are published under scheme 0208 (enterprise number), which is why a Belgian Peppol address looks like 0208:0123456789. Sometimes, scheme 9925 is used as well, which is followed by a Belgian VAT number, like this: 9925:BE0123456789.
• Representatives are checked against the CBE. During verification, the name given for the representative is matched against the company's registered representatives in the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, so a name that is not authorised is refused up front.

Create your account and API credentials

1. Sign up at app.recommand.eu/signup.
2. Your account starts with a team. The team holds your company, your subscription and your document history, and you can invite colleagues to it.
3. Create an API key on the API keys page. Note the key, the secret and your team ID.
4. Check the credentials with a request that needs no data of its own:

curl -X GET https://app.recommand.eu/api/v1/companies \
  -u key_xxx:secret_xxx

All endpoints in this guide live under https://app.recommand.eu/api/v1 and accept HTTP Basic authentication with the key as username and the secret as password. If you would rather not store a long-lived secret, JWT API keys and OAuth2 with a JWT assertion are available too, see the authentication guide.

Try it safely first

You do not have to get anything right the first time. Everything below, adding the company, registering it, sending and receiving, can be done in a playground team first, where nothing is delivered over the real Peppol network, nothing is registered on it, and nothing is billed.

Open the team switcher at the top of the dashboard and pick Add playground. Give it a name, leave the Peppol Test Network box unticked, and you are switched into the new team straight away — there is nothing to set up beyond that.

Add a company to that team and use it as both sender and recipient to watch a document travel end to end. When the flow does what you want, repeat it once in your real team.

Two things worth knowing before you start:

• POST /:companyId/generate takes the same body as the send endpoint and returns the exact XML that sending would produce, fully validated, without transmitting, storing or billing it. It also returns the resolved documentType, doctypeId and processId.
• Failure addresses. In a playground that is not connected to the Peppol Test Network, sending to 404:404 or 0208:1234567894 always fails, so you can exercise your error handling. Any other unregistered recipient is skipped without an error.

A playground stays useful after you are live, too: it is the safest place to try a new invoice layout or a new integration. See how can I test without sending real invoices.

Register the company

You are registering one company, once, so the dashboard is the shortest path.

1. Open Companies and start the company wizard.
2. Fill in the legal name, address and country, plus the identifiers described in the next section.
3. Choose whether the company should also receive documents over Peppol, or only send them.
4. Save. The company is registered on the Peppol network as part of this step: its identifiers and the document types for its country are set up for you.

Right after saving, the dashboard offers the verification step, which the section below covers. Note the company's ID from its detail page — every API call for sending and receiving takes it in the path.

Belgian identifiers and Peppol address

{
  "name": "ACME Corporation",
  "address": "123 Main Street",
  "postalCode": "1000",
  "city": "Brussels",
  "country": "BE",
  "enterpriseNumber": "0123456789",
  "enterpriseNumberScheme": "0208",
  "vatNumber": "BE0123456789"
}

Both numbers are validated against the national rules, including the modulo-97 check digit, and a mismatch is rejected instead of silently registered. For Belgian companies the enterprise number is derived from the VAT number when you leave it out.

Two Peppol identifiers are then registered for the company:

• 0208:0123456789 — the enterprise number, and the address others will use
• 9925:BE0123456789 — the VAT number

The company's Peppol address is the first one: 0208: followed by the enterprise number.

Registering as a recipient

To receive documents, the company must be published as a recipient on an SMP (Service Metadata Publisher). That is what isSmpRecipient does, and it is the default:

{
  "isSmpRecipient": true
}

What that means:

• The company becomes findable on the Peppol network: any sender can look it up and deliver to it via the Peppol network.
• Recipient registration is exclusive. If the company is already registered for receiving through another Peppol provider, registration fails until it is deregistered there.
• The document types the company accepts are registered along with it, based on its country. Which ones those are is covered further down.
• The company is only published once it is verified.

Moving an existing Belgian registration

Since the B2B mandate came into force, most Belgian companies are already reachable over Peppol through a provider of their own. Recipient registration is exclusive, so registering the enterprise number under scheme 0208 fails while the company is still published somewhere else: it has to be deregistered at its current provider first.

If this is the case, we will let you know which SMP the company is published on. You can also look the enterprise number up ahead of time with the verify endpoint, which returns the same thing.

Verify the company

A company cannot exchange documents on Peppol until an authorised representative has confirmed their identity. The company object exposes this as isVerified, and it stays false until the check is done.

For Belgian companies the flow is short:

1. Open the verification URL (from the create-company response, the dashboard, or a fresh one from the verify company endpoint).
2. Fill in the representative's first and last name. That name is checked against the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises before the identity check starts: a name that matches none of the company's registered representatives is refused.
3. Complete the identity check. isVerified flips to true and the company is published on the Peppol network.

In some cases manual verification by our team will be required. If that's the case, isVerified will remain false until this manual verification is completed. The user is informed of this in the verification process.

Verifying once, in the dashboard

You have one company, and it is verified once. There is nothing here worth automating: open Companies in the dashboard, pick the company and start verification. If you are authorised to act for the company, complete the check yourself; otherwise use the button to forward the link to whoever is.

The page is self-contained and works in any browser — the person completing it does not need a Recommand account.

That is the whole step. From here on the API takes over: sending and receiving documents is what you actually integrate.

Document types registered for you

When you register a Belgian company as a recipient, it is published for the two document types that cover almost all Belgian traffic:

Anything sent to the company in one of these formats is accepted, validated, stored and handed to you. A sender who tries a document type the company is not published for gets an error before delivery, which is exactly the point of the registration.

Need more document types, such as self-billing, message level responses, invoice responses? Register the combinations you want with the create company document type endpoint.

Pick up incoming documents

Once the company is published as a recipient, everything sent to it arrives in Recommand automatically. There are two ways to get the documents into your own systems.

Webhooks (recommended)

Register an endpoint once with the create webhook endpoint and events are pushed to you as they happen, document.received among them:

curl -X POST https://app.recommand.eu/api/v1/webhooks \
  -u key_xxx:secret_xxx \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @create-webhook.json

{
  "url": "https://your-app.example/webhooks/recommand",
  "companyId": null,
  "secret": "your_webhook_signing_secret"
}

Pass a secret and verify the HMAC SHA-256 signature on every delivery before you trust the payload, then acknowledge with a 200 before doing the heavy processing. Both are covered in working with webhooks.

Polling the inbox

If you would rather pull, the inbox endpoint lists unread documents, and mark as read drops one off the list once your system has it. Fetch details, the original XML or a rendered PDF from the documents endpoints.

Receiving without writing code

• In the dashboard. Incoming invoices appear under Sent and received, with the original XML, a readable rendering, attachments and the delivery history.
• By email. Add notification email addresses per company so incoming documents land in the mailbox your bookkeeping already watches, attachments included. See email delivery and notifications.
• In your accounting software. Forward incoming documents straight to Exact Online, Yuki, ClearFacts or another supported tool, see integrations.

Two things worth setting up early, whichever route you take:

• Labels and suppliers to keep documents organised as volume grows, see suppliers and labels.
• Rules to act on incoming documents automatically: forwarding, labelling, notifying, see rules.

The full picture, including retries and idempotency, is in receiving documents.

Going live

A short list before you start sending or receiving real invoices:

• A valid subscription, so sending is not blocked. Playgrounds skip that check; production does not.
• The company verified, with isVerified true. Until then it cannot exchange documents.
• Errors surfaced, not swallowed. Validation errors name the field that is wrong; put that in front of whoever can fix it rather than logging it.
• Webhook endpoint hardened, if you took that route: signature verification, a fast 200, retries and idempotency on your side.
• One real document sent and received, ideally between two companies you control, so you have seen both ends.
• Notification addresses set, so incoming documents also reach a mailbox somebody reads.

Where to get help

• Troubleshooting. Common rejections, delivery failures and validation errors are collected in the troubleshooting guide.
• Questions. The FAQ covers Peppol, addressing, VAT and billing.
• Email. support@recommand.eu:include the company ID and, for a delivery problem, the document ID.
• Discord. Join the server for release announcements and quick questions.
• Keep track of changes. New endpoints and behaviour are recorded in the changelog.

Other guides for Belgium

• Sending Peppol documents in Belgium for the companies you onboard
• Receiving Peppol documents in Belgium for the companies you onboard
• Sending and receiving Peppol documents in Belgium for the companies you onboard
• Sending Peppol documents in Belgium for your own company
• Sending and receiving Peppol documents in Belgium for your own company