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Sending and receiving e-invoices is becoming more and more common, but it can still quite often be perceived as messy and feel unnecessarily complicated.
One customer wants to receive Peppol, another wants Svefaktura, a third talks about EDI.
And so on.
What requirements does my customer have? What are my suppliers' requirements? What do they really mean? How can I make everyone happy? There seems to be a lot to keep track of in order to both send and receive e-invoices.
But, what is what and do you need to know exactly how everything works?
No, not really, but it can actually be nice to have a little control when the customer or supplier gets in touch with their requirements.
Many people nowadays have the idea that there are two e-invoice formats, Svefaktura and Peppol. This is very far from the truth. There are hundreds of different e-invoice formats. What confuses many people is the Peppol format, and this is often due to the confusion between the Peppol BIS e-invoice format and the Peppol network.
Hundreds of different formats
Swiss invoice, UBL, Finvoice, Peppol BIS, TEAPPSXML, OIOUBL, oioxml, Pyramid, S-EDI, bgc-invoice, ABWinvoice, IDOC, NesUBL, IFS, cXML, yes the list can be made long on the different invoice formats that exist, because as I said, there are hundreds of e-invoice formats and the thing to keep in mind is that you as a customer, or supplier, cannot control or decide which format the other party uses, because it can depend on a variety of factors, many of them beyond the control of your customer or supplier.
One thing that in many cases determines the format is the business system used, some systems use what we colloquially call "common standard formats", some business systems use their own unique format, such as IDOC which is a commonly used format in SAP. Then there is the fact that your supplier probably has many customers, not all of whom can decide which format to send to each customer.
VAN operator keeps track
That's exactly why we VAN operators exist. We are like an invoice exchange that keeps track of all formats, who should have what and how it should look. The idea is that you who send an invoice should be able to use your own format, which suits you and your business system, then the operator makes sure to convert your invoice to the correct format at the recipient. The operator also makes sure that the delivery of the invoice takes place in the correct way, regardless of whether the other party receives their invoices via Peppol's network or any other operator than the one you use.
So, in summary, it's good to know that there are a lot of different formats when it comes to e-invoicing, but really you don't need to know more than that, provided of course that you are connected to a VAN operator.
