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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 th

by xupybd 6y ago

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.

pedrocr 6y ago
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.
- xupybd 6y 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.
noAnswer 6y ago
In some parts of the world the PDFs get enriched with standardised XML. https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/what-is-zugferd/what-is-zugferd.html 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.)
- xupybd 6y ago
  Wow our main supplier is German, and so is our tool supplier. I'll have to look into this.
- DCoder 6y 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/eInvoicing https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eInv...