Financial Reporting — Your Feedback Matters

As you may know, many nations/organizations across the globe have chosen to eliminate expensive paper-based invoice management systems in favor of e-invoicing/e-billing systems. The reasons are many, but the core objective is to increase efficiency, eliminate manual processing, and produce a more touchless process.

We are now analyzing the scope of this requirement. The purpose of this post is to collect feedback in this regard and understand how we can better assist you moving forward.

What We Consider an E-Invoice?

e-invoice is used primarily for B2B and B2G business segments and includes electronic payment (or invoice) information exchange between buyers and sellers. In this post, I’m contemplating invoices that are electronically issued, transmitted, delivered, processed and stored using a specific/standardized format (one that complies with an XML schema).

Common E-Invoice Types and More

Our early research revealed that our users have encountered or dealt with the following e-invoice/e-billing related compliance standards:

• UBL or Universal Business Language - a uniform standard throughout Europe.

• ZUGFeRD or Factur-X for Germany.

• ebInterface for Austria.

• FacturaE for Spain.

• Finvoice for Finland.

Other industry-wide standards (not directly related to e-invoicing) also exist. These standards are used in the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) space:

• XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language - a digital business reporting standard that allows users to define/exchange financial information such as financial statements and balance sheets.

• HL7 or Health Level 7 - a set of standards used to transfer clinical and administrative data.

Existing Solutions

While generating such files might look trivial (after all, you are simply working with different XML structures) a number of open source solutions already exist. Here is a short list of open source projects for reference:

• UBLSharp - C# / .NET / XML library for working with OASIS UBL 2.0 and 2.1 documents.
• ZUGFeRD-Csharp
• ebInterface plugin for Microsoft Word
• FacturaE
• Gepsio for XBRL - a document object model for XBRL documents.
• HL7-dotnetcore - a lightweight library for building and parsing HL7 2.x messages, for .NET Standard and .NET Core.

Your Feedback Counts — Complete a Survey

With these open-source solutions mind, we now wish to explore your specific needs/requirements and to understand where these libraries fall short. While the lack of documentation, support, and maintenance services are obvious reasons why one might choose a commercial product over an open-source solution, we want to dig a bit deeper. We want to fully understand your specific usage scenarios/use cases and determine whether we can deliver a solution that addresses your business needs. Please review this short survey and let us know your thoughts on this subject.

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