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Receiving documents

Inbound documents arrive over Peppol and NemHandel. eCourier acts as your access point on those networks (the “inbound” side of the four-corner model): we accept traffic from other access points and make each message available to your systems through the REST API and webhooks.

How the flow works​

  1. Company and participant — Your team needs a company and at least one participant for the channel(s) you use (Peppol, NemHandel, or both). The participant is the network identity others address when they send you invoices or other structured messages. Owner, Admin, and Developer can create or change participants; registration with the network is handled from the dashboard. Use Test vs. Live consistently with your API keys so test traffic stays on test networks and production on live networks.

  2. Reachable from any access point — Once your participant is registered and active on a channel, it is discoverable network-wide on that channel’s directory (SMP / SML on Peppol, and the equivalent discovery on NemHandel). Any trading partner—using any certified access point on Peppol or NemHandel—can send documents to your participant identifier. They do not need to use eCourier; addressing is by participant, not by provider.

  3. Delivery to your integration — When a document is accepted for your participant, eCourier stores it and exposes it through the API. Your next step is to react to new arrivals (webhooks) and/or pull the payload and metadata (API), as described below.

Webhooks: notifications for incoming documents​

Subscribe to webhooks in the dashboard so your backend receives HTTP callbacks when relevant events occur—for example when an inbound document is created or its status changes. That lets you trigger workflows (fetch the file, update an ERP queue, alert staff) without polling.

See API & webhooks and the webhook API reference for how to register endpoints and interpret payloads.

API: fetch the document and details​

Use the REST API to retrieve inbound traffic programmatically:

  • Document details — Metadata and status for a document by its id (and related identifiers where applicable). Use this for dashboards, reconciliation, and driving logic after a webhook fires.
  • Document body — Download the business XML (or the representation your integration expects) for processing in your own systems.

See the REST API reference under Documents for the exact operations and fields.