How Popular Is Peppol eInvoicing In Australia?

Peppol e-invoicing has been in Australia for a while now and one of questions we get often is how many businesses have adopted Peppol as an e-invoicing standard or are considering adopting in the near future. To help answer the question we got our analysts to chew through as much data as possible and provide some insights into Peppol’s popularity in Australia at the moment.

Are People Interested in Peppol?

The first data point we started with is Google, which gives us an insight into the search popularity of search terms and topics. This is a typically a good indicator of interest into a particular topic or search term. Before we dive into the data its important to put forward some definitions to help you make sense of the data:

• Search Term: Results for a specific search term e.g. “Peppol”
• Search Topic: Results for a collection of search terms that sit under a topic, e.g. the topic “Peppol” will include all search terms related to “Peppol” like “Peppol access point”, “Peppol e-invoice”, “Peppol Australia” etc. Google creates these search topics based on searches for different related terms.
• Interest over time: Per Google, interest over time represents search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular.

To understand the interest of Peppol we assessed data from two angles, firstly interest in the search term “Peppol” and compared that against interest in “e-invoicing” so we have a suitable comparison point. To ensure we are capturing interest more broadly as well we also assessed interest in the topics “Peppol” and “Electronic invoicing”.

Interest in Search Terms

The graph below shows the search interest over time in Australia for the two terms mentioned above tracked over a 5 year period.

You can see from the data that interest in Peppol has been very low but has steadily picked up since Q1 2019 with e-invoicing tracking in a similar way. Interest peaked in Q1 this year which coincided with a number of e-invoice government mandates brought in by the Federal government. The inclusion of procure to pay gives you a good comparison point which is likely to be searched by a similar audience.

Interest in search topics

The graph below shows the search interest over time in Australia for two search topics, so will therefore be more inclusive of other search terms, charted across a 5 year period.

The data tells a similar story to the search term graph, the most interesting difference is the way in which interest in Peppol has taken a sharp increase since Q2 this year whilst interest in electronic invoice has taken a sharp dive in the same time frame.  This implies that Peppol is more increasingly popular as a search term for e-invoicing with less people searching generically for “e-invoicing” and more for “peppol”.

What does this mean?

Interest in Peppol in Australia is definitely on the rise and the term is becoming more well known and more well used in the market.  We are certainly seeing this in our own data, with monthly website visits to our Peppol related pages up over 880% compared to March 2021.

Who is Interested in Peppol?

Obviously the data from Google can’t tell us exactly who is interested in Peppol but there are two data points that we can pull together to help give us an insight. One is the location data from Google, with the large majority of searches coming from ACT, then NSW then Victoria.

The second data point is based on our own experience. Whilst we have had a number of Peppol access point related discussions with Government agencies and businesses supplying to governments, by far the biggest area of interest has been for business to business transactions – businesses wanting to get connected to the Peppol network and then onboard both their buyers and suppliers.

Why are businesses interested in B2B transactions through Peppol

Whilst each business has had a different journey to getting to adopting Peppol there are a number of key themes that we have seen from our business customers as to why they are adopting Peppol as an e-invoicing standard:

Increasing the Percentage of e-invoices to drive AP automation

Businesses particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have been searching for ways to get more with less and effectively work remotely. Peppol e-invoicing enables businesses to drive  touch-less invoice processing where its matched with a purchase order or touchless, more accurate data capture of invoice data including accurate invoice line item information.

Enable automation in their long tail suppliers

Long-tail suppliers create an invoice processing issue for every business. Finding more efficient ways to make the invoice processing process far more efficient for these suppliers other than manually data entering data from a PDF invoice or using a OCR tool and dealing with data capture accuracy issues has been a key driver of adoption. The majority of long tail suppliers are smaller in nature and utilising Peppol enabled accounting systems like Xero, MYOB, Quickbooks etc, this means that these businesses can now, with a click of a button send their e-invoices via Peppol.

Investing once to drive direct connections with multiple suppliers

What has been the most common driver for adoption is the ability for businesses to invest once into the Peppol network which will enable them to connect with more and more businesses as they join the network. Typically we have seen these businesses paying out a lot of money to build custom integrations with their biggest suppliers, a significant investment of time, effort and money for the business and their suppliers. With Peppol, businesses and their suppliers are seeing the opportunity to pay once to connect the Peppol network and then be able to automatically transact with everyone else in the network without any new integration costs. Add in to this that they connect with their smaller customers and suppliers who are able to send and receive Peppol invoices natively in their small accounting platform like Xero, MYOB, Quickbooks etc.

how many businesses are in the peppol network in australia?

As at the time of writing there are: