Sending Peppol documents in the Netherlands for your own company

This guide walks through everything needed to exchange Peppol documents for a company registered in the Netherlands, assuming you are setting up your own Dutch company, and that the company only sends 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 the Netherlands

The Netherlands sits between Belgium and France in complexity: the network is plain Peppol, but Dutch buyers commonly expect the Dutch specialisation of EN 16931 next to Peppol BIS 3.

What is specific to the Netherlands:

• SI-UBL 2.0 (NLCIUS) alongside Peppol BIS 3. Dutch companies are registered for both, so a sender can reach them with either. Recommand can write and read both formats.
• KVK numbers are the Peppol address. Dutch companies are published under scheme 0106 (Chamber of Commerce), so a Dutch Peppol address looks like 0106:12345678. The VAT number is registered as well, under scheme 9944.
• No general B2B mandate (yet). Unlike Belgium, the Netherlands does not require electronic invoicing between businesses across the board. E-invoicing is required when invoicing Dutch central government, and Peppol is the established channel for it.

No country-specific fields are needed on the documents themselves. A valid EN 16931 invoice is accepted; sending SI-UBL is a matter of selecting that format, not of filling in extra data.

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.

Dutch identifiers and Peppol address

{
  "name": "Voorbeeld B.V.",
  "address": "Keizersgracht 1",
  "postalCode": "1015 CJ",
  "city": "Amsterdam",
  "country": "NL",
  "enterpriseNumber": "12345678",
  "enterpriseNumberScheme": "0106",
  "vatNumber": "NL123456789B01"
}

Both are validated against the Dutch formats — an 8-digit KVK number and a VAT number shaped like NL123456789B01 — and rejected if they do not match.

Two Peppol identifiers are registered for the company:

• 0106:12345678 — the KVK number, and the address others will use
• 9944:NL123456789B01 — the VAT number

The company's Peppol address is the first one: 0106: followed by the KVK number.

Registering for sending only

Because you are only looking to send invoices or other documents, register the company without recipient registration: set isSmpRecipient to false (or leave the checkbox unticked in the dashboard).

{
  "isSmpRecipient": false
}

What that means:

• The company is not published as a recipient on an SMP, so nothing is delivered to it over Peppol through your integration.
• Registration succeeds even when the company already receives its documents through another Peppol provider. The other Peppol provider will remain in charge for processing received documents for this company.
• Nothing changes for sending: outgoing documents leave through the access point as normal.

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 Dutch 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. The representative fills in their name and completes the identity check.
3. 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.

Pick the document format

Dutch recipients registered through Recommand accept both Peppol BIS 3 UBL and SI-UBL 2.0 (NLCIUS). Send BIS 3 unless a buyer asks for SI-UBL, in which case name the SI-UBL document type on the send request:

The document you post is the same in both cases: the format decides how the XML is written, not which fields you fill in.

Before a first send to a new recipient, check that the recipient exists with the verify endpoint and that it accepts the format you intend to use with the verify document support endpoint — a recipient outside Recommand may well be registered for BIS 3 only.

Send a document

One endpoint sends everything: POST /:companyId/send. The companyId is the sender, recipient is the Peppol address of the receiver, and document is the invoice or credit note as JSON. Recommand will validate the document and generate the XML.

curl -X POST https://app.recommand.eu/api/v1/{companyId}/send \
  -u key_xxx:secret_xxx \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @send-invoice.json

{
  "recipient": "0208:0123456789",
  "documentType": "invoice",
  "document": {
    "invoiceNumber": "INV-2026-001",
    "issueDate": "2026-08-17",
    "dueDate": "2026-09-16",
    "currency": "EUR",
    "buyer": {
      "name": "Customer Company",
      "street": "Customer Street 1",
      "city": "Antwerp",
      "postalZone": "2000",
      "country": "BE",
      "vatNumber": "BE0987654321"
    },
    "paymentMeans": [{ "iban": "BE68539007547034" }],
    "lines": [
      {
        "name": "Consulting Services",
        "quantity": "10.00",
        "unitCode": "HUR",
        "netPriceAmount": "100.00",
        "vat": { "category": "S", "percentage": "21.00" }
      }
    ]
  }
}

The seller block is filled in from your company when you leave it out, which is usually what you want: it keeps your registered identifiers and the document in agreement. The full field reference lives in sending invoices and sending credit notes.

Worth wiring up while you are here:

• Validation errors. Outgoing documents are always validated. A success: false response with errors keyed by field path is a document the recipient would have rejected — surface it wherever the data was typed.
• Email fallback. Pass email.to with when: "on_peppol_failure" to fall back to email when a recipient turns out not to be reachable over Peppol, or send with recipient: null for email-only delivery. See email delivery and notifications.
• PDFs. pdfGeneration.enabled attaches a generated PDF of the document. You can also attach an existing PDF (or other files) via attachments; see adding attachments.

For a full field reference, see sending invoices and sending credit notes.

Sending without writing code

The same send is available two other ways, and they mix freely with the API:

• From the dashboard. Send document takes the recipient and the invoice lines, previews what the recipient will get, and remembers your usual settings. You can also drop an existing UBL or CII XML file into the upload zone if your software already produces one.
• From your accounting or invoicing software. If you use one of the supported tools, let it do the work: your invoices flow to Recommand and out over Peppol without retyping. See integrations for the current list, including Microsoft Business Central, Exact Online, Yuki, ClearFacts, ERPNext and Harvest.

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 the Netherlands

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