Axens' e-invoice gap: check your AP data before Peppol arrives

What Axens found

Axens is a French petrochemical company with about 2,000 staff in 13 countries. According to a Républik report published on 6 November 2026, it has run SAP for 18 years and moved to S/4HANA in 2024. Its supplier invoices go through Symtrax's Compleo Invoice Platform. Symtrax's case study says the platform went live on 1 January 2024 and handles more than 20,000 invoices a year from over 1,000 suppliers, nearly 60% of them international. Compleo matches each invoice against purchase orders and delivery documents, checks price variances and VAT rates, then posts to SAP through the standard MIRO and FB60 transactions.

Since 1 September 2026, large French companies have had to receive and issue e-invoices through approved platforms. Once Axens' French suppliers started sending structured invoices through those platforms, the company found gaps. At a user group workshop, SAP manager Thibaut Moreaux explained that the standard exchange between platforms doesn't carry all the information the old workflow pulled from PDFs with OCR and AI. Axens' accountants now fill in the missing details by hand. ERP News points out that the report doesn't say which fields are missing. At the September deadline, 48 suppliers had connected through an approved platform. Those suppliers sent 13.4% of the invoices Axens received, and 290 suppliers still hadn't switched. Axens would like the original PDF attached to the structured invoice, but no fix has been agreed.

Why a French accounts payable problem matters here

Most commentary treats structured e-invoices as a straight improvement on PDFs. On accuracy, structured invoices usually are better: nobody rekeys anything and nothing gets misread by OCR. Axens shows a cost that gets less attention. A mature OCR setup can be tuned to capture whatever is printed on the page. That includes free-text references, site names, job numbers and approver names that suppliers print in unusual places. A structured standard carries only the fields the standard defines and the sender's system fills in. If an accounts payable process relies on information outside that set, the gap only shows once invoices start moving to the new channel.

The finding is more useful because Axens isn't a laggard. The company had already digitised intake, matching and approvals, and Républik describes its own switchover as immediate and trouble-free. The problem was in what the invoices contained, and it appeared when only about one in eight invoices had moved across. As the remaining 290 suppliers convert, the manual reconstruction work will grow with them.

The NZ timeline

New Zealand has no general business-to-business e-invoicing mandate, but the government procurement rules are pushing more invoices onto Peppol. Under Rule 44 of the Government Procurement Rules, agencies that receive more than 2,000 domestic trade invoices a year had to be able to receive e-invoices through their main accounts payable systems by 1 January 2026. From 1 January 2027, those agencies must require large suppliers to send e-invoices. A large supplier is one whose total revenue, including subsidiaries, exceeded $33 million in each of the two previous accounting periods. The rule covers domestic invoices in NZ dollars. It excludes rent, leases, insurance premiums, credit card statements and staff expense claims.

Two groups of NZ organisations should pay attention to the Axens case. The first is large suppliers to government. They'll be sending e-invoices from their ERP within weeks of the new year, and agency accounts payable teams will notice whether those invoices carry what's needed to match and approve them. The second is any private business that receives invoices. Suppliers who build Peppol capability for government customers are likely to turn it on for other customers too, so more invoices will arrive through Peppol. Neither group will necessarily hit Axens' problem, and neither will know without testing its own workflow.

Where the data gaps tend to hide

NZ accounts payable teams often rely on information outside the core invoice fields. Common examples are a purchase order number typed into a free-text reference, a job or project code, a delivery docket number used for goods receipt matching, a site or cost-centre name, and the name of the person who placed the order. In a PDF workflow, a clerk or an OCR template finds those details wherever they're printed. In an e-invoice, the receiving ERP only gets them if the supplier's system maps each detail to a defined field and the receiving system reads that field. Axens' missing fields haven't been published, and France's format isn't the same as New Zealand's Peppol specification. NZ firms will need to test their own fields instead of waiting for a checklist from overseas.

The sending side carries its own risk. A supplier's ERP can produce a valid Peppol invoice with an empty purchase order reference. The invoice passes the format checks but still fails the buyer's three-way match and becomes an exception. For a large supplier to government, each exception means slower payment and another query for its accounts receivable team. Exceptions are where automation savings usually disappear, so we'd treat field mapping as part of the process and automation work, separate from the compliance tick-box.

Axens also made a build-versus-buy decision that NZ firms will face. It chose a third-party platform over SAP's own Document and Reporting Compliance module because it wanted one provider covering the rules in every country where it trades. NZ businesses on Business Central, NetSuite, MYOB Acumatica or SAP Business One will have a similar choice between native e-invoicing features, an Access Point provider's portal and a separate intake tool. Whatever they pick has to carry the fields their matching rules depend on.

Practical next steps

• List every field your accounts payable team or OCR tool uses to match, code and approve invoices, including anything read from free text or attachments. Then mark which of those fields your ERP's e-invoice import actually maps.
• Take a sample of Peppol e-invoices you've already received and compare each one with a PDF invoice from the same supplier. Missing references will show up quickly.
• If you're a large supplier to government, check that your ERP fills in the buyer reference and purchase order fields on outgoing e-invoices. Test with one agency customer well before 1 January 2027.
• Ask your Access Point provider whether attachments such as the original PDF or delivery dockets can travel with the e-invoice, and confirm your ERP stores them against the transaction.
• Track the share of invoices arriving as e-invoices each month, so the extra manual work is visible before it grows to the size Axens now faces.
• Before buying a compliance add-on, check what your current ERP already handles natively and where its import mapping stops.