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
Russ Garrett@erincandescent OCRing? I reckon most invoices are still hand-keyed...
@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
will-h@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).
eta@russss @erincandescent isn't this like, the whole point of XBRL