By Tim Cole, COO at Causeway Technologies and Interoperability Interest Group Chair
At a European level, moves to harmonise electronic invoicing practices and to mandate its adoption are nearing a conclusion. Driven by a need to unlock benefits, projected to be in excess of €200m over 6 years, the requirement is for electronic exchange to become the predominant invoicing method by 2020. To facilitate this, it was agreed to build a European Semantic invoice standard (European Norm). This has been developed under a European Directive and coordinated by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN – Technical Committee 234), with input from standards bodies across all EU countries. This work has progressed reasonably well and the standard is now available for testing.
Whatever the result of the UK Brexit negotiations, UK buyers, suppliers and application providers will all need to embrace the European e-invoicing standard. Already, plans are being agreed for adoption by public procurement authorities – including the NHS in the UK.
Under the EU Directive there is an obligation, from November 2018 at the latest, for public sector contracting authorities to receive and process ‘compliant’ e‐invoices submitted by suppliers. Compliant e-Invoices are those that have adopted the European Norm and are submitted in one of a defined list of Syntax bindings (data standards). On the Syntax point, the agreed syntax list is now expected to include only two standards, namely UBL 2.1 and UN/CEFACT (Cross Industry Invoice XML).
So, what does this mean for BASDA, and other, e-Invoicing Standards?
Well, probably very little in the short term. The Directive only provides a framework to support moves towards a mandatory adoption. It does not require those processing invoices in “existing” formats to make any changes to their processes. Neither does it prevent adoption of other standards in the future. The objective is to rapidly increase adoption and support interoperability. BASDA standards are widely used and it is perfectly legitimate to continue to use these standards to exchange e-Invoices. One activity BASDA could undertake, when the European Norm is finalised, is to create a “binding” between the European Norm and the BASDA standard. This would demonstrate how the required information defined in the Semantic standard would be exchanged within the BASDA Syntax.