Erin 💽✨Electronc invoicing is like the most boring topic in the world and yet the amount of human toil that is going to be saved by governments mandating it is incredible
it’s incredible that in 2026 the vast majority of invoices are handled by hand typing or at best OCRing fucking PDFs and when things get complicated (e.g. payment and VAT in different currencies! very common in cross border scenarios!) this gets imeasurably more miserable because your software can’t find the exchange rate field or wants the exchange rate in the inverse form from their invoice gives you or inumerable other corner cases
My business has received it’s first two electronic invoices and you cannot believe how unreasonably ecstatic I am at this fact
You also cannot imagine how eager I am for the supplier who charge on a usage basis and hence have had to hand-enter the amount every month to get themselves on the e-invoicing bandwagon
Jernej SimoncĚŚiÄŤ ďż˝@erincandescent You mean electronic invoices in the form of XML with a digital signature? These have been mandatory in Slovenia for invoicing public institutions for years, and are supported by pretty much every business (looking at my e-mail, the oldest eInvoice from my ISP is from 2012).
@jernej__s yes. they’ve been mandatory in germany for invoicing government for a while but most businesses are not yet sending them (by default, at least)
will-h@erincandescent @jernej__s it's also becoming mandatory in Poland this spring, FWIW
Sven@erincandescent also it got us the madness of an acronym that is ZUGFeRD
halcy​ 
@erincandescent one day we *will* have the technology to transfer numbers electronically
@erincandescent I say that but actually I guess here we already do, and digital invoices with autopay are amazing
eta@erincandescent also I recall like Japan not having a 'reference' field for their electronic payments AT ALL so half of the employees in any company over there are permanently doing accounts receivable
Russ Garrett@erincandescent OCRing? I reckon most invoices are still hand-keyed...
@russss this is probably actually accurate.
@erincandescent I still maintain that the most straightforward way to fix this would be some standardised structured data embedded within a PDF. Everyone already handles PDF invoices and this would automatically improve things. Sort out the fancy EDI stuff later.
@russss Maybe once upon a time. At this point the majority of businesses in the EU are legally required to accept EN 16931 compliant (UBL or CII) e-invoices, and in a couple of years will be required to send them for all domestic e-invoicing, so I think at this point any different format would just be more complicated digvergence from the defacto standard with growing support.
The EDI bits of UBL invocing aren’t that complicated anyway, and while a lot of the EU is mandating sending them via EDI networks like PEPPOL in Germany it’s totally acceptable to send them by e-mail, it’s just that from next year larger businesses have to send e-invoices and from the year after all businesses do.
We do have a standard hybrid format, it’s FakturX/ZuGFerD, which is of course just an XML e-invoice inside a PDF
@erincandescent @russss I'm actually increasingly concerned about deliverability of invoices (of any type) using email anyway, so it's attractive for us to have a different method.
Having to submit invoices via some wanky a/r platform is quite annoying too and perhaps better e-invoicing will make that easier.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@erincandescent @russss Makes me wonder what kind of foss software there is for dealing with that stuff (although wouldn't surprise me that I'd end up making it myself, both for generation and extraction).
@russss @erincandescent isn't this like, the whole point of XBRL
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i was fascinated when I learned this was still mostly manual. the "cutting edge" solution $dayjob has right now is just doing OCR. great stuff
i was fascinated when I learned this was still mostly manual. the "cutting edge" solution $dayjob has right now is just doing OCR. great stuff
BradleyKSherman@erincandescent Purchase orders have a lot of edge cases. Electronic invoicing will make things less flexible but maybe more efficient --for the computer.
@bks i don’t see how it doesn’t make things more efficient for the human. if only because i don’t have to deal with so much vat nonsense!
@erincandescent For you, perhaps, but the buyer's opinion might be different. Not a big deal, I'm sure it will make your life easier.