DM Sep-Oct 2022

Dm OPINION: E-INVOICING
Invoicing moves with the times
Harvey Spencer, Vice-President Xamcor, outlines the opportunity he sees for the
document management industry in the most recent moves toward electronic
invoicing
There is an active move to
transition from paper based
invoicing to e-invoices that is
emerging in the UK, and that has a
chance to be more widely adopted
than EDI. We all know that electronic
invoicing should be cheaper and faster,
providing an easier capability to create
straight through processing with less
manual labour to post invoices and
approve them for payment.
Faster payment in a world of
increasing interest rates is of great
interest to the payee, but the payer
may prefer to slow things down.
Nonetheless it should help with
leveraging discounts for quick
payment. EDI, though, never really
took off because it was an arcane
standard that was totally
incomprehensible to the average
human! Hopefully it will be different
this time.
NEW STANDARDS
The new standards are based on the
ZUGFeRD standard that was first set up
in Germany in 2017. It consists of a
PDF human readable rendering of the
invoice with an attached computer
readable XML tagged file: in effect the
best of both worlds. The XML file was
standardised as EN16931, but that
seems to have changed to UBL
(Universal Business Language).
ZUGFeRD (https://www.pdftools.com/en/zugferd)
has gone
through a number of iterations and in
late 2018, electronic invoices from
business to governments (B-to-G) in
the EU were mandated to use the
ZUGFeRD format.
UBL is an open library of standard
electronic XML business documents for
procurement and transportation such
as purchase orders, invoices, transport
logistics and waybills. It was developed
by OASIS (www.oasis-open.org) from
the EN16931 standard.
Recently PEPPOL (Pan-European Public
Procurement Online) a not-for-profit
organisation based in Belgium
(www.peppol.org), has been a key
driver in Europe. PEPPOL provides a set
of UBL Universal Business Language)
specifications for establishing the
implementation of an electronic
procurement system for use across
multiple different jurisdictions. Using
PEPPOL, participant organisations can
deliver UBL formatted procurement
documents to each other including
electronic invoices in the XML machine
readable formats.
The primary implementation of
PEPPOL was in March 2022 with
485,411 participant organisations from
78 countries registered to receive
procurement documents. But since
April 2020 all public sector institutions
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September/October 2022
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