alt Hacker NewsA standard for invoices seems like something that an accounting body should create that is optional for businesses, not something mandatory created by the government. People will generally follow an optional standard to make their own lives easier, but a mandatory one introduces a compliance middleman into the invoicing process.
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Electronic invoicing makes the live of the receiver easier. The sender has to adapt the standard.
Besides, many standards have been created over the past 20 years, yet most invoices are still only sent as PDF.
Having worked with accounting body standards (NAIC), I can tell you that it really does nothing to improve quality. Especially when parts of the standard encode things like COBOL PIC number symbols. [1]
[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.4.0?topic=arithmetic...
> People will generally follow an optional standard to make their own lives easier
People invent their own standard to make their own lives easier at the cost of making everyone else's lives miserable which is exactly what the European Committee for Standardization was intended to prevent.
The accountancy bodies are national so it would end up with one standard per country. But yea should probably not be mandatory.
If you want something to work in multiple countries, you have little choice. Otherwise you get x standards
That's just not how the EU functions.
> People will generally follow an optional standard to make their own lives easier
You must be new to the internet /s
A company does not gain anything by sending "better" invoices that follow a standard. Only if they receive standardized invoices, but usually not enough to pay extra for it. The fact that standardized invoices haven't happened yet without legislation should be proof of that
In the EU there is the "reverse charge" mechanism for VAT when commerce crosses country borders, and it is often used for defrauding EU countries / governments.
The invoicing standard is an attempt to mitigate reverse charge fraud by gathering more machine-readable data. Some countries even demand that b2b invoices are sent to the country, which then dispatches a copy to the recipient.
Knowing this background, it's pretty clear why the EU is making it mandatory.
Personally, in the abstract I like the idea to mandate the use of an open standard, I think we have way too many inefficiencies from treating many things as text documents that could be data structures. I don't like this particular standard though, it's bloated and the result of a typical top-down process.
I much prefer it when there are competing standards for a while, and one or a couple of winner emerge on technical merits. THEN I have no objections to a regulatory body picking a standard and mandating it.