Set Up Receiving of Supplier Documents

Receiving runs on Business Central's own E-Document framework. You add an e-document service, point it at this app as its integration, and Business Central then reads the platform inbox on a schedule and turns supplier documents into purchase documents. This article covers what to set, and the two settings that are easy to get wrong.

Sending is a separate path and is not configured here. See Send Posted Sales Invoices and Credit Memos.

Prerequisites

A working connection and a mapped company whose Can Receive is set. If the platform is not the receiving access point for your Peppol identifier, the inbox will always be empty.
The E-Document Core app, which ships with Business Central.

Set up the e-document service

Choose the Search icon, enter E-Document Services, and then choose the related link.
Create a service, and set Document Format to PEPPOL BIS 3.0.
Set the service integration to E-Invoice Platform (receive). Selecting a non-Microsoft connector requires consenting to the use of non-Microsoft systems.
Turn Validate Receiving Company off.
On the Importing FastTab, turn on Automatic Import and set Batch Start Time and Minutes between runs. The Receive action stays available as a manual trigger.

Step 4 needs explaining, because turning a validation off looks like a shortcut and is not one here. Business Central's check matches the receiving party on a GLN or the VAT Registration No. on Company Information. A Belgian company has neither in the form the check wants: a GLN is only populated when the endpoint scheme is 0088, and the Belgian localization refuses to write the worldwide VAT Registration No. on a Belgian party — it insists on Enterprise No. instead. Inventing a GLN would be worse, because Business Central's own Peppol export then uses it as the endpoint identifier.

The app makes the same assertion itself, against the Peppol identifier the document is actually addressed with, and refuses anything addressed elsewhere. From 2026 release wave 1 you can also register a Service Participant Identifier and Scheme on Company Information; if you use that route, re-test before changing this setting.

If you try to use this service to send, it refuses with an explanation rather than doing something plausible-looking:

The E-Invoice Platform connector receives documents; it does not send them. Send posted documents with the Send via E-Invoice Platform action, which produces the payload this platform expects. To stop Business Central offering this service for sending, clear its entries under Configure documents to export on the E-Document Service.

Configure how the inbox is read

These fields are on E-Invoice Platform Setup, under Incoming Documents.

Field	What to choose
Inbound Look-Back (Days)	How far back to look when reading the inbox, so the first run does not import years of history. Leave it at 0 for the default of 30 days.
Track Which Documents Are Read	Turn this on once the inbox is busy enough that walking the whole window every run is wasteful.
Recognize Suppliers on Incoming Documents	Turn this on. Business Central cannot identify a Belgian supplier on its own.
Approval for Incoming Documents	Leave As Is, or Send for Approval to route created purchase documents into your approval workflow.

Two of these deserve a sentence of their own.

The look-back window is a real cut-off. If receiving is switched off for longer than the window, documents older than it are not offered again. Widen it before a long pause, not after.

Tracking read state writes to the platform. When it is on, a scheduled import asks only for unread documents and marks each one read once Business Central has taken it — which other tools can see. When it is off, every document inside the window is offered every time and Business Central's own duplicate detection absorbs the repeats. Scan Inbox Now ignores this setting and always reads the whole window, so it stays available to find anything that was marked read without arriving.

Turn on supplier recognition

Business Central matches an incoming e-document to a vendor in a fixed order: GLN, then VAT Registration No., then the participation identifier registered for the vendor, then name and address. For a Belgian supplier the first three miss — a GLN is only populated for endpoint scheme 0088, the Belgian localization does not write the worldwide VAT Registration No., and the participation identifier is keyed on a value the Peppol path never fills. What is left is fuzzy matching on name and address, which is not something to route payments on.

Without a confidently matched vendor there is no automatic G/L coding at all, and a new e-document is created on every poll for the same supplier.

Switch on Recognize Suppliers on Incoming Documents, then choose the Apply Supplier Recognition to Services action. That action selects this app's recognition on every e-document service receiving through the platform.

The action is needed because of a difference between the two import processes Business Central can run a service on. The Import Process is shown per document on the Incoming Supplier Recognition list:

On Version 1.0, recognition works through the registered Peppol identities either way.
On Version 2.0, it only runs when it has been applied here — and Business Central does not display the field on the service that stores it, which is why the action exists.

The Applied To Services indicator on the setup page tells you whether it is in place.

Verify the setup

Choose Scan Inbox Now from the Vendor Bank Approvals page, or wait for the scheduled import. Then open E-Invoice Inbound Runs to see what happened: how many documents the platform returned, how many were handed to Business Central, and how many were skipped as your own outgoing post, as addressed to another party, or as older than the window.