If your finance team is currently paying an outside EDI provider a recurring fee to keep your Business Central environment talking to Walmart, a major distributor, or a third-party logistics partner, the preview notes for Business Central 2026 release wave 2 probably caught your eye. Buried in the update 29.0 feature list is the new EDI documents feature: the ability to exchange orders and payments, not just invoices, directly through the E-Documents framework using the Peppol BIS 3 standard. For a CFO or IT director who has spent years signing checks to a middleware vendor just to keep retail trading partner mandates satisfied, that sentence reads like an invitation to finally consolidate. It is worth understanding exactly what changed before anyone drafts a cancellation notice.
What the new EDI documents feature actually adds
Business Central’s E-Documents framework is not new. It has existed for several release cycles as the mechanism behind country-specific e-invoicing mandates: Peppol for Australia and New Zealand, OIOUBL in Denmark, XRechnung and ZUGFeRD in Germany, Factura-E in Spain, with France support arriving this year. Until this release, the framework’s job was largely to get sales invoices out the door and purchase invoices in, formatted correctly for whichever national authority or trading network required them.
What update 29.0 adds, currently in public preview as of September 2026 and scheduled for general availability in October, is support for exchanging orders and payments through that same framework, using the Peppol BIS 3 EDI standard specifically. In practical terms, that means a document type beyond the invoice can now move through E-Documents using a message format built for machine-to-machine exchange rather than a PDF attached to an email. That is a genuine expansion of scope, and for the right customer it closes a real gap.
The catch is in the phrase “Peppol BIS 3.” Peppol is a specific network and message specification, developed originally for European public procurement and now widely used for e-invoicing compliance across the EU, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and a growing list of other jurisdictions. It is not the same thing as the ANSI X12 or EDIFACT standards that govern the EDI relationships most North American manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors maintain with retail trading partners. A purchase order transaction set 850, an invoice 810, or an advance ship notice 856 sent through a retailer’s EDI network does not speak Peppol, and nothing in this release changes that.
Why the connector layer still matters
There is a second detail worth flagging before anyone assumes this feature makes Business Central’s e-document capability self-sufficient. The E-Documents framework has always relied on named third-party service connectors to actually move documents onto whatever network the recipient uses. Pagero, Avalara, Logiq, SignUp’s ExFlow e-invoicing service, and B2BRouter are the currently supported options, and each requires its own separate contract and, in most cases, its own subscription cost. Microsoft’s documentation is explicit that these are external commercial relationships, not services Microsoft itself manages end to end.
That architecture does not change with the EDI feature. Adding order and payment support to E-Documents means the framework can now carry more document types over the Peppol BIS 3 rail, but a business still needs a connector relationship in place to actually reach a Peppol access point, just as it does today for invoices. For a company operating primarily in Peppol-covered geographies, that is a meaningful simplification: one framework, one set of document types, and potentially fewer point-to-point integrations for order confirmations and payment status messages that previously ran through a separate mechanism entirely.
For a company whose EDI obligations run through a North American retail network instead, the calculus barely moves. The dedicated EDI platforms built around Business Central, names like TrueCommerce, SPS Commerce, and the various Business Central-specific EDI ISV solutions on AppSource, exist precisely because they translate between Business Central’s data model and the X12 and EDIFACT transaction sets that retailers, grocers, and big-box trading partners require, along with the value-added network relationships those partners often mandate. None of that is addressed by extending Peppol BIS 3 coverage to orders and payments. If your EDI provider’s invoice is for connecting to a VAN and translating X12 850s into sales orders, this preview feature does not touch that relationship at all.
What to actually check before wave 2 reaches general availability
The practical work here is not deciding whether to switch, it is figuring out which category your organization falls into, and that requires a document-by-document inventory rather than a guess. Start by pulling the list of every trading partner your company currently exchanges electronic documents with through Business Central, and note the standard each one actually uses. A subsidiary invoicing government or large enterprise customers in the EU, Australia, or New Zealand through a Peppol access point is a strong candidate to benefit directly once this feature reaches general availability, since order and payment documents for those same relationships may be consolidatable into the same connector and the same E-Documents setup already in place for invoicing.
A distribution or manufacturing business fulfilling retail purchase orders through a VAN-based EDI relationship should not expect this update to reduce that spend. It is worth raising the question directly with your existing EDI provider anyway, since some of them are exploring hybrid support that bridges Peppol and traditional EDI standards, and a provider roadmap conversation now costs nothing and might surface options before your next contract renewal.
It is also worth remembering that this is a preview feature, not a shipped one. General availability is not expected until October 2026, and preview functionality in Business Central has a track record of shifting in scope, licensing treatment, or connector support between preview and GA. Testing this in a sandbox environment against a real Peppol-connected trading partner, rather than assuming the release notes describe the final behavior, is the responsible way to validate whether it does what your business actually needs before making any commercial decision tied to it.
One more consideration deserves a place on the evaluation checklist: cost. Connector-based e-document exchange through Avalara, Pagero, or similar providers is typically priced per transaction or per connection, separate from Business Central licensing itself. Adding order and payment document types to that same connector relationship may increase transaction volume through the connector without necessarily reducing your total third-party spend, particularly if your current EDI provider is priced on a flat annual basis rather than per document. Getting an updated quote from your connector provider that reflects the expanded document scope, before assuming the math works in your favor, avoids an unpleasant surprise on the next renewal invoice.
The gap this does close
None of this is a criticism of the feature itself. Extending E-Documents to cover orders and payments, and doing it through a widely adopted international standard rather than a proprietary Microsoft format, is a sensible direction for a platform that increasingly serves multinational subsidiaries alongside single-entity small businesses. Firms with meaningful European, UK, Australian, or New Zealand operations that have already invested in Peppol-based invoicing now have a credible path to extend that same investment to a broader set of transaction types, which is exactly the kind of incremental platform improvement that reduces the number of point integrations a lean IT team has to maintain over time.
The mistake would be treating a preview release note as a green light to unwind an existing EDI relationship without first confirming which standard that relationship actually runs on. Routeget’s engagements with Business Central customers on electronic document strategy typically start with exactly that inventory: mapping every trading partner document exchange against the standard it uses, before any conversation about consolidating connectors or renegotiating contracts. That groundwork takes a few days, and it is the difference between a genuine cost reduction and a canceled contract that gets reinstated three months later once a retail partner’s EDI compliance team sends a noncompliance notice.
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