Towards digital invoicing: What is Mercurius?

While Peppol is an international network that facilitates e-procurement and e-invoicing via access points, Mercurius is the software platform on which Belgian government departments can receive, process and send e-invoices and other documents in UBL format.

Central ‘email room’

Mercurius acts as a central "email room" for all public sector entities. On the one hand, it receives incoming Peppol email messages, which can be retrieved by the appropriate department at fixed times. On the other hand, outgoing messages are collected and added to the Peppol network.

The goal of this platform is to support electronic invoicing by all Belgian governments and public services - the federal and Flemish government, as well as regional and local government services. With Mercurius, all e-invoices from suppliers reach the right government department.

Connected to Peppol Access Points

Mercurius is connected to certified Peppol Access Points. Do you want to send your e-invoices to a Belgian public service? Then you need to connect to a Peppol Access Point and send your e-invoices to the Access Point to which Mercurius is connected.

What does a typical B2G e-invoicing flow look like?

In practice, the process to send and handle B2G e-invoices looks like this.

• The supplier sends their e-invoice to the customer using the Peppol transport infrastructure.
• Mercurius receives the e-invoice (on behalf of the customer). 
• Mercurius puts the e-invoice in the mailbox of the customer.
• The customer retrieves their e-invoices at their own pace.
• he customer processes the e-invoice.
• The customer prepares a response to the e-invoice and sends it to Mercurius.
• Mercurius sends the response to the supplier (via the Peppol network, via an email or to be consulted via a portal site).

How do you send an e-invoice to the Mercurius platform?

If you work with billing software such as Billit, it's especially easy to send your invoices to a government agency. All you need is the company number or Global Location Number (GLN number) of the government agency you want to invoice to, the PO number and an account from your billing accounting software.

The benefits for companies

The Mercurius portal offers companies some important advantages. 

• All companies can reach all government entities in the same way. Eventually, the entire government sector - a total of 5,900 entities - will be accessible via Mercurius or the Peppol network.
• Thanks to Mercurius sender and recipient will see the same information about the receipt and processing of the supplier's e-invoice. This creates additional transparency.
• And most importantly: thanks to automated processing, you as a supplier get paid faster!

The Mercurius portal offers everyone the chance to track sending and processing e-invoices to all government agencies in a 100% correct manner.