Build Your Own PEPPOL eInvoicing Integration or Use Promis?

If your accounting platform needs to offer eInvoicing in Australia, the choice is between building a bespoke PEPPOL integration yourself and embedding Promis as an "invisible engine" behind your product. Promis is the better fit when you want to reach market in months rather than years and don't want PEPPOL specifications to become a core engineering project. Building in-house only makes sense if eInvoicing itself is your differentiator and you have the developer capacity to absorb a long, specification-heavy build.

What each option actually involves

Building your own PEPPOL integration

PEPPOL is the international standard for eInvoicing, and Promis describes bespoke integrations as time consuming and problematic. The company says it spent 25,000 developer hours on PEPPOL and eInvoicing — a figure that gives a sense of the scale of the data transformation work involved before your platform can send and receive invoices.

A self-built path means your team owns the full data transformation process between your accounting system and the PEPPOL network, and keeps owning it as specifications and network requirements evolve.

Using Promis

Promis positions itself as the engine that lets accounting system providers and their users send and receive eInvoicing over PEPPOL without investing in that development work. The stated benefits for platforms and their users:

• Save time and money — Promis claims you save thousands of dollars and months of software development.
• Skip the specifications — you don't have to work directly with PEPPOL specifications.
• Demonstrate industry leadership — offer eInvoicing to your users and enable their suppliers.

Compare on the dimensions that matter

Why the Australian context pushes toward the faster option

eInvoicing has arrived in Australia, and Promis notes it is rapidly changing the AP/AR landscape. Businesses of all sizes can now send and receive electronic invoices, cut down on data entry errors and wage costs, rely less on paper and PDF invoices, and get paid faster.

There is also a government incentive: the Australian Government says it is working with the software industry to use PEPPOL, and eInvoicing issued to the Government will be paid within 5 days, with interest if they are late. The New Zealand Government will pay eInvoicing in 10 days from 1 July 2020. Promis frames this as an opportunity for platforms to demonstrate industry leadership.

If your users' suppliers are being pushed toward eInvoicing by these payment terms, the cost of arriving late is measured in lost customers, not just development spend.

How to decide

Choose Promis if:

• eInvoicing is a feature your users expect, not the product itself.
• You want to offer it without hiring for or diverting developers into PEPPOL specification work.
• You are targeting Australian (and potentially New Zealand) businesses that want faster payment terms.

Build in-house if:

• eInvoicing is central to your product's differentiation.
• You have developer capacity that would otherwise be underused, and you are comfortable owning the data transformation process permanently.
• You need control over the integration beyond what a third party provides.

Next step

Promis offers a "Schedule Your eInvoicing Success Session" and a contact route to get started, and publishes pricing at promis.co/pricing. Check the pricing page for current terms before committing, since the source material does not state figures.