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Many suppliers wonder about the status of their invoice. This is a legitimate concern, and the Mercurius Portal was actually designed to address it. Thanks to the Mercurius Portal, any supplier can easily track-and-trace the reception of his documents by the customer, as well as the business response (approval of the document) by the customer. The present article describes how it works in practice, illustrated with typical screenshots.

In order to retrieve documents on the Mercurius portal, it is however necessary that the supplier in the document in question is identified by the (Belgian) CBE number and not the VAT number. Foreign companies also fall under this exception.

If you wish to obtain the status of such an invoice, please contact your customer directly.

It takes 2 to 4 simple steps, depending on the level of details you are interested in:

Step 1. Log in to the Mercurius Portal

Belgian Peppol Authority > Was my invoice duly received by the customer? What is the status? > portaal EN.png

If you get error messages (for instance, "Sorry, you are not registered as company legal representative or billing officer. Therefore you cannot use this site. ... "), please refer to the separate procedure, How get access to Mercurius portal?, that explains how to get access.

Step 2. On the screen you should see the list of invoices you sent

Belgian Peppol Authority > Was my invoice duly received by the customer? What is the status? > portaal 1 EN.png

Details on how using Mercurius for track-and-trace can be found here.

Remarks:

At this level, you can already see what is the (business) status of your invoice:
- received: the document has been received by the customer (even if he did not yet download it from Mercurius; this actually doesn't matter to you, for we take full responsibility of this transfer)
- processed: the document has been retrieved by the customer and he has approved the document - notice that approving an invoice can take some time, depending on customer-specific factors.
- rejected: the document has been rejected by the customer for some reason. Contact the customer (receivable) in case you need extra information.
If the list is too long, you can use the top filters to narrow down your query.
If you are looking after a test document - we mean here explicitly a document sent to our test environment - be sure to switch to the test environment first, using the switch located at the top right of the screen:

Belgian Peppol Authority > Was my invoice duly received by the customer? What is the status? > portaal 2 EN.png

If you can't find the invoice you are looking for, then use our online assistance request form to ask for support. Please communicate the following information :
- transmissionMessageID
- invoiceNumber
- enterprise number of the receiver
- enterprise number of the sender
- transmissionTime

NB: We only perform this service for production. For test, please use our Test Document Lookup facility.

Step 3. (Optional) click on the invoice line.

To access more information about the invoice, click on the corresponding line in the list. The Mercurius portal will display the invoice details page. Here is a screenshot from a typical invoice details page:

Belgian Peppol Authority > Was my invoice duly received by the customer? What is the status? > 2017-10-11 14_02_01-Microsoft Edge(2).jpg

Legend:

Human Readable Version (pdf) of the invoice entered on the portal (only available for invoices/credit notes entered on the portal)
Attachment(s) joined to invoice (available on all channels: PEPPOL, portal and legacy)
link to invoice message (technical: see step 4)
link to message attachment (for every attachment a separate message is created)
in case the invoice is processed there is a link to the response message for the invoice received from the customer
in case the attachment is processed there is a link to the response message for the attachment received from the customer

Step 4. (Optional) click on the message details

From the invoice details page, you can access additional technical information - typically, to trace what exact message was received, at what moment, when it was transferred to the customer... To access the message details page, click on the link close to the label "Related Messages" - as highlighted on the screenshot above, number 3. Notice that sometimes there are several messages. For instance, one for the invoice, one for an attachment, one for a customer response, one when the message was resubmitted, ... .
When the message arrives on Mercurius, it gets 3 possible timestamps:

timestamp when message arrived on Mercurius
timestamp message was read by the customer
timestamp message has been marked as retrieved by the customer

The Mercurius portal will display the invoice details page. Here is a screenshot from a typical message details page when the message is ready for download (has arrived on Mercurius):

Ready for download
Message retrieved but not yet marked for deletion
Message retrieved and marked for deletion

How does a document go to the status "processed" or "rejected"? This status change is the result of a "response message" sent by the customer. This response does not only affect the document status on the Mercurius Portal. It is also transmitted back to the supplier (the same way as the suppliers sends an invoice, he receives a response). So, depending on your own IT tools, you as a supplier can automate the processing of the responses. For more information, please discuss this with your IT solution provider.

Still problems or questions?

If you still have questions or experience problems with the proposed steps, you can still contact the Mercurius Service Desk by filling in the assistance request form.