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Core concepts

The few terms the rest of these docs rely on, and how they fit together. Read this once before you set up your first company or integration.

Complyance turns the invoices your systems already produce into e-invoices each country accepts. A handful of things make that work. This page names each one the way the app does.

How does an e-invoicing API work?

Many countries now require invoices as structured data rather than PDFs. Each country has its own format and its own rules, and many want to see an invoice before, or soon after, it reaches the buyer.

With Complyance, you send your invoice data once, in one format: GETS. Complyance then:

  1. turns it into the format the invoice’s country requires
  2. checks it against that country’s rules
  3. sends it to the tax authority, or over the Peppol network, depending on the country
  4. returns the result to you

If the invoice fails a check, the response lists what to correct. If it passes, you get a documentId and follow the document while delivery continues. Your request has the same shape for every country; only the fields each country requires differ.

To try it, send your first invoice. To see what each country uses, open Country coverage.

How it fits together

  1. You work in a workspace.
  2. In it you onboard a company, with one or more branches.
  3. A source is the system that sends that company’s invoices, such as an ERP.
  4. An integration maps the source’s payload to GETS, the format Complyance works in.
  5. You test the integration in a testbed, in sandbox.
  6. When it passes, the source sends real invoices in production, and Complyance delivers them to the tax authority.

Your account

  • Workspace: The account space your team works in. You create it when you sign up. Everything else on this page belongs to a workspace. The workspace menu at the top of the sidebar has Switch Workspace, Manage Workspace and Create Workspace.
  • Company: A legal entity that issues invoices and is registered for e-invoicing in its country. You add it with Add Company when you onboard a company.
  • Branch: A location or unit of a company, such as an office in Dubai. Each company has at least one. You add more with Add Branch.
The workspace menu at the top of the sidebar, for the Acme Trading workspace, with Switch Workspace, Manage Workspace, Create Workspace and Logout.
The workspace menu at the top of the sidebar.

Sending invoices

  • Source: A system that sends invoices to Complyance, such as an ERP or a billing tool. A source has a name and a version, for example acme-erp version 1.0.0, and every request names it. See Sources.
  • Payload: The invoice data your system sends, in its own shape. A sample payload is what you build an integration from. The Developer portal keeps them in the Payload Manager.
  • GETS: The Complyance standard invoice format. You map your data to it once, and Complyance produces what each country needs from it. See the GETS field reference.
  • Mapping: How a source’s fields correspond to GETS: your invoice_no is GETS documentNumber, and so on.
  • Integration: A mapping built in the Integration engine: your payload’s fields matched to GETS, plus the fields each country requires. You start one with New Integration.
  • Integration engine: The Developer portal tool where integrations are created, tested and managed. It maps your data. It is not a catalogue of ready-made ERP connectors. See Integration engine.
  • Testbed: Where an integration runs against test cases before it goes live. You choose the integration, country, test case and environment, then select Test. See Testbeds.

Environments

  • Sandbox: The environment for testing. Invoices sent in sandbox never reach a tax authority. Every new integration starts here.
  • Production: The live environment. Invoices sent here are delivered to the tax authority. Your API key belongs to one environment, so a sandbox key cannot send to production.

You change environment with the environment switcher. See Switch country, environment and portal.

The app

  • One Platform: The product businesses use for their own invoicing.
  • Invoice Portal: The part of One Platform where finance teams work with documents and reports.
  • Developer portal: The part of One Platform where developers set up integrations, sources, API keys and webhooks.
  • Partner Platform: The product for ISVs, accounting firms and system integrators who work on behalf of their customers. See Partner Platform.
  • Credits: What submitting documents uses. Your balance and every change to it are on the Credits page.

Next, create your account.

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