Peppol and access points: how UAE e-invoices actually travel

Peppol is an international network and set of standards for exchanging business documents electronically. It is run by the OpenPeppol association and is already used across Europe, Singapore, Australia and elsewhere. Instead of every firm building its own connection to every customer, each firm connects once, through its provider, and can then exchange documents with anyone else on the network.

The UAE system is built on Peppol. UAE e-invoices use PINT AE, the UAE's localisation of the Peppol International Invoice format, and the exchange follows the decentralised five-corner model set out on the five-corner model page.

Providers connect to Peppol as access points. In the UAE, the providers in the exchange are Accredited Service Providers (ASPs): service providers accredited by the Ministry of Finance. The accreditation criteria are set by Ministerial Decision No. 64 of 2025. Your provider sits at corner 2 of the model: it takes your invoice, validates it, converts it to the UAE PINT AE format and sends it over Peppol to your customer's provider. Incoming invoices travel the same road in reverse.

Businesses may not send invoices to the Federal Tax Authority directly — there is no direct route. Exchange happens through an accredited provider, and the FTA receives the tax data from that exchange as corner 5.

Each business on the network is identified by a Peppol participant ID, issued through its provider when the business is set up on the network. It works like an address for documents: your provider uses your customers' Peppol IDs to route invoices to the right provider, and your customers' providers use yours to deliver invoices to you.

You do not apply for a Peppol ID from the government or from OpenPeppol yourself. It comes as part of being connected by your accredited service provider — one more reason the choice of provider comes before your mandatory date, not after it.

Start with accreditation: the provider must be accredited by the Ministry of Finance to act in the UAE exchange — ask for that plainly. Then ask how the connection to your own invoicing will work in practice, because your invoices have to reach the provider in a form it can validate and convert. The deadlines for appointing a provider are on the mandate and deadlines page.

• Are you accredited by the Ministry of Finance as a service provider for UAE e-invoicing?
• Do you issue our firm a Peppol participant ID, and how long does setup take?
• How do our invoices reach you — what connection do you offer to the invoicing we already use?
• Do you validate invoices and convert them to the PINT AE format before sending?
• How do we receive incoming e-invoices, and how are errors and rejections reported back to us?
• What does the service cost, and what exactly is included?

Access points are businesses: they run certified infrastructure, carry liability for delivery, and charge for it — typically bundled into software subscriptions or priced per document or per connection, with the shape varying by provider and market. Any page quoting you an exact dirham figure for access-point services in the UAE today would be inventing it, because pricing follows the accredited providers' commercial offers as the market forms. What you can demand now is the shape, in writing: what is included in the subscription, what is metered, and what switching providers would cost.

Hold that against any "free e-invoicing" claim: the sending may be bundled, subsidised or genuinely included — but somewhere in the chain, certified infrastructure is being paid for, and the honest question is by whom and how visibly. InstaJack's own route is recorded in this cluster: a named ASP connection proven in a test environment, an adapter still to build, and no filing offered to customers until it is real. When pricing for our connection exists, it will be published as plainly as our pack prices are.