e-invoicing (electronic invoicing)

[jimfoxy]

e-invoicing has, apparently, just become mandatory for public sector purchases in the EU. What is the simplest solution for a business that would normally attach a pdf invoice to an email to do this?

 

[JCresswellTax]

A pdf printer

 

[jimfoxy]

A pdf printer

A pdf file attached to an email is NOT considered e-invoicing.

 

[jimfoxy]

Delved a little deeper. This has become mandatory in Sweden so far. The university that is our customer has no portal set up for invoicing but is refusing to accept pdfs attached to emails. From what I can understand, however, until they have a portal set up they will accept invoices sent through the post.

 

[ffox]

Delved a little deeper. This has become mandatory in Sweden so far. The university that is our customer has no portal set up for invoicing but is refusing to accept pdfs attached to emails. From what I can understand,

Zoho and QuickBooks appear to advertise templates for their packages. Additionally you can submit in XML or even CSV format, but to do so you would need a recipient specification that tells you what fields are required by their import process and which order the field should be in.

Is there a Swedish standard that defines this?

 

[jimfoxy]

Is there a Swedish standard that defines this?

Thanks for the reply. They give the following options interspersed with terminology with which we are unfamiliar. 1) 3rd party VAN operator connected to Visma Proceedo's standard channel, 2) Send e-invoices directly to Visma Proceedo, 3) PEPPOL Access points. Looks like there are some providers of the PEPPOL service. Non of our customers do we invoice more than about twice a year. This is going to be an utter drain of time and effort for a small business like ours; yet another sweeping move to penalise small businesses favouring the large corporate overseers served on a plate claiming it will 'save vendors and buyers' time and money. ONLY THE BIG BUYERS who have massively inefficient admin departments due to their own incompetence and fat. The utter bull crap that has been written by self promoting fintech leeches to con people into thinking e-invoicing will save money compared to pdf attached to email is unbelievable. There is no way this will save money for small businesses. We've just been forced into new accounting software with MTD which creates pdf invoices quite nicely, thank you very much, and now we might have to pay for some invoicing tack-on which probably won't interface with it so we'll probably have to use some manual intervention to copy data from one to the other. I don't think that will reduce mistakes or save time or money.

 

[JEREMY HAWKE]

We turned away some work from one of the largest animal feed companies in the UK last year .
The reason for this was that it was for a weekly job that would take 90 minutes and after paying the driver and fuel I would have made about £20 but the hassle involved in stetting up as a supplier made the whole job unviable . Some of the procedures that large organisations have in place now make dealing with them pointless
The sage online account system sends an email to the customer with a PDF but also an option to view online but I know you are staying with your system !

 

[ffox]

Visma Proceedo's

Is software from a particular provider - https://sourceforge.net/software/product/Visma-Proceedo/

Peppol is the IT standard for e-commerce - https://peppol.eu/what-is-peppol/

A google search for Peppol compliant invoicing software returns a fair number of packages claiming compliance, including QuickBooks, Xero and Zoho. Alternatively you could develop an in house conversion process.

It all depends on cost versus benefit.

Hope this helps

 

[jimfoxy]

Some of the procedures that large organisations have in place now make dealing with them pointless. The sage online account system sends an email to the customer with a PDF but also an option to view online but I know you are staying with your system !

I think this must be very common but small businesses don't often have the time to complain about it; thanks for your input. The governments and larger organisations are strong-arming smaller businesses into having more overheads. It is openly admitted that the refusal of pdf invoices by Sweden's public sector has been done to force people into e-invoicing. It does seem, however, that until Swedish institutions have put web portals in place for low volume suppliers, they will accept postal invoices (the cost to the supplier of such being the incentive to push to e-invoicing - £1.35 standard to send a letter to Sweden from UK). Of course, the institutions would not have to implement web portals if all their suppliers switch to e-invoicing. Using a web portal comes with its own training overheads. Where is the impartial help for small businesses to choose which software to invest in? A long list of providers does not represent help or guidance. It was the same with MTD.

Thanks for your comment re sage but e-invoicing is badly named. It has little to do with representing an invoice digitally. The invoice must be produced as a certain digital code which obeys a structure as dictated by some arbitrarily chosen format standard, of which there are many, then interfaced through a third party system. Obviously it costs to buy software and support to do this and I believe there are licenses involved if you want to implement things yourself. It's already here with the NHS where emailed pdfs are banned and suppliers have to use a digital third party to get an invoice to the NHS (they do allow posted invoices for now I believe) .

 

[jimfoxy]

Is software from a particular provider - https://sourceforge.net/software/product/Visma-Proceedo/

Peppol is the IT standard for e-commerce - https://peppol.eu/what-is-peppol/

A google search for Peppol compliant invoicing software returns a fair number of packages claiming compliance, including QuickBooks, Xero and Zoho. Alternatively you could develop an in house conversion process.

It all depends on cost versus benefit.

Hope this helps

Cost vs benefit. Yes, but the cost shouldn't be there; it is being bullied onto small businesses by the bigger businesses and public sector organisations without any acknowledgement. Has anybody seen the FSB's take on this? Do they actually do anything useful?

Thanks for the links but these things come with both subscription and training overheads. Any change, and you might have to train again.

 

[jimfoxy]

CoudTrade seems to have a very good idea. Automatic extraction of the text fields embedded in pdf documents, so any accounting system can be used. I'm not sure how it works exactly as someone at some point has to decide how to identify the various text and value fields which will vary across different accounting systems. One would hope part of the software solution sits with the vendor who needs to teach the software (once only and could be done with little technical knowledge) which field means what on their standard invoice pdf invoice. No idea of cost. Anybody any experience with CloudTrade as a small business?

 

[ffox]

Automatic extraction of the text fields embedded in pdf documents, so any accounting system can be used.

Sounds like a plan. I can't find any pricing info for CloudTrade and data scraping from PDF documents is probably not the most efficient process. Perhaps it might be better to look at use of an invoicing system that automatically produces e-invoice data, ready for transmission to the customer.

It would mean changing some or all of the accounting suit. However, with e-invoicing now becoming more prevalent (NHS in the UK) it may be wiser and more cost effective to fix this from the bottom up, rather than patching existing systems.

 

[jimfoxy]

data scraping from PDF documents is probably not the most efficient process

Thanks for looking for prices. Me neither; I'll get in touch when I get the chance. Extracting from pdf documents is absolutely the most efficient process practically if you already have pdf generating software in place where the invoice format is unlikely to change and many of your customers can't take e-invoices. A micro business does not want bookkeeping/accounting software separate to invoicing software. Click, click, click with the lowest overheads is what a micro business wants. All these things are parasitical necessities on what the micro business actually wants to do which is provide a service or goods in exchange for money.

 

[ffox]

I hear what you are saying. And I've automated many systems in the past that take data from the most convenient place, but extracting data from what is effectively a report (PDF print) has inherent risks. Invoicing is important and the data should be pulled from the package that creates the invoice in the first place.

If that is an invoicing module in the accounting system, and your current accounting system cannot produce e-invoicing compatible data, perhaps the accounting system is ready for replacement.

A few years back I was asked to investigate an invoice to PDF to external printing and mailing business where one third of the invoices were simply failing to reach the printing company.
It turned out that the invoicing software was producing a non ANSI character in certain circumstances in the output and the PDF printer was dropping the entire PDF file when that happened. There was no audit trail and the item loss was around 1000 invoices per week. These had to be manually reproduced.

You need a clear, concise audit trail through the process and that is unlikely to be the case in any PDF printing or scraping routine.