Why Peppol totals differ

Sites that track the Peppol network publish different totals in the same week: from about 8 million to more than 10 million. None of them has to be wrong. They count different things, from different sources, on different days.

Each figure as its source states it on the date we checked. We have not verified them; the differences are explained below.

Five reasons the totals differ

1. IDs or companies. A Peppol participant is an identifier (ID), not a company. One company can be registered with several IDs, for example a Belgian company with its company number and its VAT number. Counting IDs gives a higher total than counting companies.
2. Directory or network. The Peppol Directory is the public phone book of the network. For most service providers, publishing their customers there is voluntary, so not every company that can receive invoices is listed ^[1][2]. The network's own address book (the SML) cannot be downloaded as a list; it answers one ID at a time. A total built from the Directory alone is a lower bound. A total that adds IDs found another way, for example by asking the service providers' SMP servers, comes out higher.
3. Listed is not reachable. The Directory also keeps companies that cannot receive anything today: the entry is still there, but the network has no address for the company any more, or its registration accepts only invoice responses, not invoices. Some totals count these entries, others do not.
4. Test and repeated entries. An export can contain test participants and the same ID more than once. Whether a source removes them is rarely stated.
5. The date. The network grows fast. One weekly report counted 431,302 new participants between 27 September and 3 October 2026 alone ^[3]. Totals taken a week apart differ for that reason only.

Our own counts

We count every ID in the daily Peppol Directory export ^[4]. Each month we also look up a sample of the listed companies on the live network: is the company registered in the SML, and can its access point receive an invoice?

• IDs in the Peppol Directory export
  9,349,422
  As of 28 Oct 2026

Data licence: CC BY 4.0. Free to reuse with credit: “Source: E-Invoice Map (einvoicemap.com)”. Press and reuse

How we sample and weight is on the methodology page. The figures per country are on the Peppol statistics page.

Totals published by others change often. We check them every month. If a figure on this page is out of date, please report it.