Digital Invoices vs new eInvoices what are the benefits of e-invoicing over the PEPPOL network?

We chatted with Kris Elliott from Storecove about e-Invoicing over the Peppol network in our 'Ask the Experts' series.
We all know what an invoice is right? It’s a commercial document issued by a seller to a buyer that contains the details of a commercial transaction for things like products & services. If asked to picture in their head an invoice, most people will visualise an A4 document. When email took off as a serious business tool people started emailing through invoices, because it was faster and cheaper than printing & posting them. These emailed invoices are what we would call Digital Invoices. They are created and distributed as files with some never even actually becoming a physical printed document. Both invoices and digital invoices are considered to be semi-structured documents. They are semi-structure in the sense that there are certain compulsory elements that are contained to be a valid invoice (e.g.: Date, invoice number, GST number, total, etc). But they aren’t fully structured in the sense that there is no consistency around the format of how that information is presented. Put more simply, digital invoices are still created with the piece of paper in mind so the design and layout of how the invoice information is included on the page is completely variable between systems and/or companies. That’s where e-invoices come in. Strictly speaking, an e-invoice is an exchange of data more than it is a document in the A4 paper sense of the word document. It is structured into fields and designed to be exported by one system and imported by another. They aren’t designed to be human-friendly with logos and nice layouts etc. In many ways, this is much like what some people could know as EDI, which is although there are some differences.
Digital invoices are created to be interpreted by people, whereas e-invoices are created to be ingested by systems. There are solutions in the market that can emulate the human experience and capture or interpret the invoice information so a person doesn’t have to, but one could argue that those solutions are trying to convert a digital invoice into the format an e-invoice would already be in so that the data can be ingested into a finance or AP system. See: acmo.com.au/go/apay
That is one of the main reasons why a company would choose to transact with e-invoices. The consistency and accuracy of invoice data can lead to speed in both processing and payment and enables workflow automation with improved visibility.
Learn more www.acmo.com.au/solutions/pep...