Peppol and the ABN: confirm who is behind the identifier

Australian e-invoicing runs on the Peppol network, and the ABN is the address. An e-invoice goes to a number, so the number had better belong to the business you think it does.

The ABN is the Peppol identifier

Australia's e-invoicing framework uses the Peppol network. A business is identified on it by its ABN, under the ABN participant identifier scheme (0151), and the Australian Taxation Office is the Australian Peppol Authority. You send an e-invoice by giving your software the receiver's ABN, with no email address or bank details to exchange. Federal government agencies receive e-invoices through Peppol; for business-to-business invoicing there is no general mandate, so use is voluntary (check the ATO's e-invoicing pages for the current position). The ATO does not see the invoices that pass through the network.

Why look the ABN up first

Because the ABN is the whole address, a wrong or stale one sends an invoice to the wrong place or nowhere. Before you add a supplier or customer as a Peppol trading partner, or before you pay an e-invoice that arrived from a new sender, it is worth confirming that the ABN is well-formed, that it belongs to the entity named on the document and that the entity is still registered.

• Check the ABN's check digit (the weighted sum divisible by 89).
• Match it to a registered company and compare the name and the state with the invoice.
• Look at the status: strike-off pending, in administration or deregistered are reasons to stop.
• Check the GST number if the invoice charges GST.

The call returns the registered company behind the ABN, with status, region (the state), postal_code and, where the ABN is active and registered for GST, vat_number.

What this does not tell you

• Whether the business is registered on Peppol. A valid, active ABN is not a Peppol registration; that is with the business's access point. Ask your access point or the business.
• Sole traders, trusts and partnerships. They hold ABNs and can use Peppol, but the API serves registered companies only, so they will not match; use ABN Lookup.
• GST history. A current snapshot only; ABN Lookup holds the dates.
• An e-invoice's content. Format validation and delivery belong to your access point.

Where it fits

In an accounts-payable or e-invoicing workflow the lookup is one step before onboarding a trading partner and one more when a payment run picks up a new sender. The same record feeds your supplier master, and POST /monitor tells you if the company is struck off or goes into administration afterwards. For the wider picture see e-invoicing and company data.

Australia is included in every plan at no upcharge. The 14-day free trial includes 500 credits, needs a card and charges nothing; Starter (EUR 9.99 a month, 1,000 credits) follows unless you cancel. A company record costs 1 credit; an error response costs nothing. See pricing for the plans.

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Contains data from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) Company Dataset and the Australian Business Register (ABN Bulk Extract), licensed CC BY 3.0 AU (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/). Adapted by Prometiam (joined, normalised, status derived).