There is a standard for communicating most common business data, called UBL.  Amongst other items, it does cater for invoice data exchange.  I’ve heard of UBL before, and a search on it returns recent documentation.

I’m going to throw the idea at the folks over at saasu.com and see what sort of interest there is.

I think the setup of an easy method of delivering invoices in an electronic format that can be both read  / printed in human format, AND imported into an accounts system is actually the crux of the issue.  There are standards there, but making communication secure, without being too difficult to implement would be ideal.

Two methods I can think of.

1) The customer nominates an email address to receive UBL format invoices.  They can then manually import the invoice into their system or perhaps nominate an email address that is checked by their system for invoices.  I feel an ‘auto’ email solution has risks of spam and people being silly sending fake invoices to the email address.

2)  The customer connects to the provider via a simple webservice api.  This can be done over a secure channel, using authentication.  It requests the latest invoices and pulls them into the system.  I feel this method is much less vulnerable to misappropriation.

Issues I can see with the format is the categorisation of each line of data in the invoice.  For example, my internet supplier is my phone supplier as well.  I get one invoice containing internet, and phone details.  I wish to pin the different invoice items to different accounts to see my spending in different areas.  I’m not sure of the current UBL Invoice format accomodates for that.

Of course, unless a major player such as Google began providing access to their billing information in UBL, I doubt it would become very mainstream.

One thing is for sure though.  The current method of requiring customers to login and download each invoice individually is very labour intensive and time consuming.  In larger organisations, implementation of electronic invoicing could greatly reduce the cost of processing invoicing, and improve the accuracy of data being recorded.

For more details on UBL XML visit http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/#INSTANCES