Building on Microsoft E-Documents

Microsoft’s E-Document framework gives Business Central a solid foundation for electronic document exchange — a standard data model, service interfaces, document lifecycle tracking, and sending profiles. It’s well designed, and it’s the right starting point.

Centara eMessaging plugs directly into this framework. We implement Microsoft’s IDocumentSender and IDocumentReceiver interfaces, so everything you already know about E-Documents in BC — the logs, the statuses, the sending profiles — works exactly as you’d expect. We just take it further.

What we add

A PEPPOL Access Point you don’t have to source separately

The E-Document framework needs a connector to actually send and receive documents. Centara provides that — we operate our own certified PEPPOL Access Point (CentaraIQ), so you’re connected to the full PEPPOL network (1.2M+ participants) without needing a separate provider.

Documents are delivered through European-hosted infrastructure protected by Cloudflare edge security, with TLS 1.3 and AES-256 encryption.

AI extraction for documents that aren’t structured XML

PEPPOL documents are already structured — the fields parse cleanly. But many suppliers still send PDFs by email, or you have paper invoices that need to be scanned. The E-Document framework doesn’t handle these.

Centara adds a multi-engine AI pipeline that turns unstructured documents into the same structured format as a PEPPOL invoice. The pipeline combines leading AI models from Anthropic and Mistral for extraction and classification, with confirmation through trusted enterprise models like Azure Document Intelligence — each covering the others’ blind spots for accuracy no single model can match.

The result lands in your inbox looking just like any other e-document — same workflow, same status tracking, same posting process.

Smart routing so invoices code themselves

When an invoice arrives, Centara’s Vendor Posting Setup determines exactly how it should be posted — which GL account, which dimensions, which cost centre. The rules are based on vendor, item, and accounting cost combinations, with support for percentage-based line splitting and conditional logic.

This means most invoices are fully coded before anyone looks at them.

Purchase order matching

Incoming invoices are automatically compared against open purchase orders — matching on vendor, PO reference, and line items with configurable price and quantity tolerances. Matched documents can flow straight through to posting.

Approval workflows designed for purchase documents

Standard BC approvals work at the document header level. Centara adds purpose-built approval workflows that go deeper:

• Line-level approval — each invoice line can route to a different approver based on who owns that cost centre
• Four-eyes principle — require a second approver above a configurable amount
• User groups — any team member can approve, so work doesn’t stall when someone is out
• Auto-post on approval — when the last approver signs off, the document posts immediately

External attachment storage

BC stores document attachments in the database, which can get expensive at scale. Centara’s Attachments module moves them to external storage (Azure Storage, Cloudflare R2, or any S3-compatible provider) while keeping the user experience identical. Most customers see a 50–80% reduction in database size.

More than just invoices

Beyond sales invoices and credit memos, Centara handles:

• Purchase Orders — auto-sent when released
• Despatch Advice — auto-sent on warehouse shipment (via the Warehouse extension)
• EDI — EDIFACT, X12, BASDA, X400 for trading partners who don’t use PEPPOL
• E-Commerce — Shopify and WooCommerce order import
• LS Central — POS transactions to PEPPOL invoices (via the LS Central connector)

You don’t choose between Microsoft’s framework and Centara — you get both. Microsoft provides the standard, Centara provides the implementation. When you open the E-Document list in BC, you see all your documents — the ones Centara sent, the ones Centara received, tracked with Microsoft’s standard statuses and logs.

Getting started

If you’re new to e-documents in Business Central, the Setup Wizard configures everything — the Microsoft E-Document service registration and the Centara platform connection — in one flow.

If you’re already using the E-Document framework with another connector, switching to Centara is a standard service registration change. See Installation for details.