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0 pointsxupybd5y ago0 comments

I'm surprised PDF is the default format for emailed invoices and purchase orders. 99% of the time someone has to key that PDF into another system and most of the time they can't copy and paste anything from the source PDF.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

noAnswer5y ago· 2 in thread

In some parts of the world the PDFs get enriched with standardised XML. https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/what-is-zugferd/what-is-zu... (If you bill a government agency in Germany, the PDF has to contain the data in ZUGFeRD format.)

DCoder5y ago

ZUGFeRD is part of EU's creatively titled eInvoicing [0] project, compatible implementations should exist in other EU countries sooner or later.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eInv...

xupybdOP5y ago

Wow our main supplier is German, and so is our tool supplier. I'll have to look into this.

pedrocr5y ago· 1 in thread

The state of the art is to have OCR of those PDFs to automate it. There's a huge amount of corporate/enterprise solutions that are just working around not doing proper interfaces and integrations. There's even the concept of "Robotic Process Automation" to make working around not being able to deliver working software sound cool.

xupybdOP5y ago

Yep I use Doc parser as our customers don't want to setup custom EDR.

I can understand that but I can't understand why accounting packages don't have a standardized EDR for Purchase Orders and Invoices.

There are specs out there for example the GS1 spec, anything similar would be great.

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