Peppol identifier tool: build a participant ID and look it up in the Directory

A Peppol participant identifier is a scheme code from the ISO 6523 list, a colon, and the value that scheme issues, for example 0208:0417497106 for a Belgian enterprise number. The tool above composes the identifier from the two parts, normalises it, and looks it up in the Peppol Directory. A hit tells you the participant published a business card; a miss does not prove the participant is unreachable.

How a participant identifier is built

Every identifier has the same shape: <scheme>:<value>, carried under the meta-scheme iso6523-actorid-upis. The OpenPeppol Policy for use of Identifiers states that a participant identifier consists of "An Identifier Scheme" and "The value provided by this Identifier Scheme", that the scheme must come from the normative Peppol code list, and that "All Participant Identifier values have to be treated case insensitive". In practice, write the value without spaces or punctuation, in lower case where letters occur.

1. Pick the scheme that the recipient's country uses for the network. Belgium expects the enterprise number (0208); Germany uses the Leitweg-ID (0204) for public bodies and the VAT number (9930) for businesses; France uses SIRET (0009) or SIREN (0002).
2. Take the value exactly as the issuing register writes it: a Belgian number has 10 digits (a leading zero is added to the old 9-digit form), a SIRET has 14 digits, a German VAT scheme value carries the DE prefix.
3. Join them with a colon. In a UBL invoice the same pair appears as <cbc:EndpointID schemeID="0208">0417497106</cbc:EndpointID>.

Common schemes

These rows are taken from the Peppol participant identifier scheme code list, version 9.7 (2 July 2026); for the VAT-number schemes, whose structure the list does not spell out, the value column shows the national VAT number format. Rows marked deprecated in the list must not be used for new documents; rows with a removal date cannot be used after that date at all.

The complete list is on the OpenPeppol code list page; background on Peppol identifiers.

Looking an identifier up in the Peppol Directory

The Peppol Directory is a search index of business cards that service providers publish through their SMP for the participants they host. It can be searched by name, country or exact identifier, and the same search is available as a REST API under /search/1.0/json, where the participant parameter "Searches for exact matches in the Peppol participant identifier field (the identifier scheme must be part of the value)". So the query is iso6523-actorid-upis::0208:0417497106, not the bare number.

A result shows the entity's name, country and additional identifiers from its business card, not which document types it can receive; that lives in the SMP.

What "not found" means

Not found means no business card for that identifier is in the Directory. It does not mean the participant is not on the network. Publication to the Directory is done by the SMP provider and is separate from registering the endpoint in the SML; a participant can be fully reachable and still absent from the Directory, and the Directory can lag behind a recent registration. Before concluding that a customer cannot receive, try the other scheme their country uses, check for a missing leading zero, and ask which identifier their provider registered.

How KRONENWERK handles this

SUPPORTED WITH LIMITATIONS KRONENWERK sends and receives over Peppol through an accredited access point provider (Storecove) once the company is connected in Settings → Delivery. Before a Belgian invoice is sent, KRONENWERK derives the recipient's identifier from what is on the customer record: it accepts the ISO form (0208:0417497106), the provider form, or a bare Belgian VAT number, which it converts to the enterprise number scheme 0208 that Belgium requires. It then asks the access point whether that participant can receive; a customer that cannot be resolved is reported as not reachable, never delivered "somewhere". The schemes KRONENWERK maps are those in the table for BE, FR, NL, DE and PL. The limitation: the lookup depends on the provider connection being configured and reachable, and KRONENWERK itself is not a Peppol access point. Details on sending and receiving over Peppol, the Peppol overview and the Belgian mandate.