Lesson 2 — The ASP account, and what Verified means
A toggle on its own transmits nothing. The account you create in this lesson is the identity your documents will travel under.
The obligation. Transmission over Peppol and the reporting of tax data to the Federal Tax Authority happen at corner 2, performed by a provider the Ministry of Finance has accredited. How accreditation works, how to shortlist a provider and what to ask them is course 3.1. This lesson picks up at the moment your chosen provider sends you credentials.
The mental model. An ASP account is a record in your database holding one connection, to one provider, in one environment. A Generic REST ASP ships in the box, so there is something to select on the day you create your first account and nothing to build. Adding a different provider later is a new adapter model plus one entry in a selection list, with no edits to the core code — an integrator's job, done once, and not something you meet again in this course.
The click path. Accounting → Configuration → UAE E-Invoicing → ASP Accounts → New. Fill in the fields below, then press Test Connection.
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Provider | The adapter to use — a Generic REST ASP ships in the box |
| Environment | Sandbox or Production, matching the credentials you were issued |
| API Base URL | The endpoint your provider gave you |
| Participant ID | Your identity on the Peppol network |
| API Key, Secret, Client ID, Webhook Secret | The credentials — visible to managers only |
Verified is a state the software sets, not one you claim. A passing Test Connection flips the account to Verified. Until it does, what you have is a record with some text in it and no evidence that anything at the other end answers. Run the test on the day the credentials arrive rather than the week you go live, because the two things that most often go wrong — a mistyped base URL, and a credential issued for the other environment — are small corrections when you find them in September and incidents when you find them in January.
Then point the company at it. Go back to Settings → Accounting → General Settings → the UAE E-Invoicing section and select the verified account as the Default ASP Account. A document can carry its own account, but the company default is what everything else will use, and leaving it blank is the single most common reason a correctly configured database still refuses to send.
The worked example. Marina Ridge receives sandbox credentials from its provider. The accounts-receivable clerk creates the account, sets Environment to Sandbox, and pastes in the API Base URL and the Participant ID. She cannot see the credential fields at all, so a manager pastes the API key and secret. The manager presses Test Connection, the account shows Verified, and it is selected as the Default ASP Account in Settings. The whole job takes one sitting, and it is finished four months before it is needed.
The failure mode. Sending fails with the message "No ASP account is configured for company …". That means exactly what it says: neither the document nor the company has an account. Create one, run Test Connection until it shows Verified, then select it as the Default ASP Account in Settings. Its near neighbour looks different and has a different cause — a screen with no ASP Accounts menu on it at all, or credential fields that are simply not present. That is a group problem rather than a configuration one, and Lesson 7 deals with it.