How does an e-invoice get from you to your buyer with no email attachment at all? The answer is Peppol's “four-corner” model and a thing called an access point.
The four corners
Think of it like email — you do not connect directly to the recipient:
- Corner 1 — you, the sender;
- Corner 2 — your access point (your service provider);
- Corner 3 — the buyer's access point;
- Corner 4 — the buyer.
The invoice travels 1 → 2 → 3 → 4: your access point hands it to the buyer's access point, which delivers it to the buyer. Exactly like your email server talking to the recipient's server.
What an access point is
An access point is a Peppol-certified service provider. You connect to it once and, through it, reach every participant on the network — no need to set up a separate connection with each client. Documents travel between access points over the secure AS4 protocol.
How it finds the recipient
This is where dynamic discovery comes in. The SMP (Service Metadata Publisher) stores each recipient's details: their unique Peppol participant identifier, which document types they can receive, and their access point's address. The SML (Service Metadata Locator) is a central registry that tells the sender's access point which SMP to ask. That is how the network knows where to send the invoice — and whether the recipient can even accept it.
Why it beats email
No lost attachments and no wrong addresses: the document is validated, routed automatically and delivered with confirmation. The recipient's system books it without anyone re-typing it.
fakts produces a valid Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 XML file that you hand to your access point or upload to your e-address. fakts prepares the file; the network takes care of delivery.