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"Everyone" is on SAP or Oracle. And yet... They send you PDF invoices with no consistent formatting. There's never a decent way to get an electronic invoice.

"Everyone" is on SAP or Oracle. And yet... They send you PDF invoices with no consistent formatting. There's never a decent way to get an electronic invoice. Any electronic files you do get, such as lists of invoices, are in a completely different format from all the others. There's no way to place an electronic order without using their website (manually or by scraping) At best, stuff comes by email. Often, you get emails that say you can go to the website to manually download the PDF.

bluedino 4y ago
EDI solves all of these
- projektfu 4y ago
  It could, if it was offered to small customers. Big buyers can insist on EDI. Small ones usually cannot and their systems are not expecting it, because EDI is "Enterprise scale" and not SME-scale. Do you know of a QuickBooks-scale accounting system that does EDI easily?
  - bluedino 4y ago
    There are VAN's like Aruba that allow smaller companies to interface with the big players using EDI
    - projektfu 4y ago
      So the answer is no.
      - bluedino 4y ago
        Hire a contractor to build an integration. What's what we did to work with Walmart.
- rexreed 4y ago
  And yet has solved none of those. I was involved in the big effort to modernize EDI decades ago to use XML, then JSON, then REST-based approaches to simplify and encourage adoption of electronic invoicing, and yet none of it really had any effect. Emailing PDFs it is. Now the best solution is using RPA tools to automatically extract information from emailed PDFs to get them into the system. Yes, it's ERP to PDF and back to ERP using NLP and automation. Such as it is.
  - v-erne 4y ago
    I hear You - I took part in many projects where the most important part was OCR for invoices. I have even seen a inner process in some local bank where they were OCR'ing their own documents that were printed first by other part's of this bank. But here in Poland the government apparently found a solution to this problem - it's called KSeF and it will force all local entities to send invoices as XML through their portal first (there will be no other legal way to invoice, because the KSeF number which is generated by the portal, is required for every legal invoice, without they won't be able to deduct VAT). Only time will tell if this will bring new era of electronic invoicing or just another failed government project.
    - rexreed 4y ago
      Interestingly, the Hebrew word for money is "Kesef". Coincidence? Probably. As for whether or not it will work, I think as long as Polish companies need to invoice non-Polish companies and vice-versa, trying to standardize in this manner will be challenging.
tomkaos 4y ago
My biggest frustration as a small business. Each month you need to deep dive in website of every service you use to find your invoice. Big company like Facebook and Google need 20 click to find your invoice. No way to automate this. I dream about a standard or a service that just collect all invoice on your google drive/dropbox.

bluedino 4y ago

EDI solves all of these

projektfu 4y ago
It could, if it was offered to small customers. Big buyers can insist on EDI. Small ones usually cannot and their systems are not expecting it, because EDI is "Enterprise scale" and not SME-scale. Do you know of a QuickBooks-scale accounting system that does EDI easily?
- bluedino 4y ago
  There are VAN's like Aruba that allow smaller companies to interface with the big players using EDI
  - projektfu 4y ago
    So the answer is no.
    - bluedino 4y ago
      Hire a contractor to build an integration. What's what we did to work with Walmart.
rexreed 4y ago
And yet has solved none of those. I was involved in the big effort to modernize EDI decades ago to use XML, then JSON, then REST-based approaches to simplify and encourage adoption of electronic invoicing, and yet none of it really had any effect. Emailing PDFs it is. Now the best solution is using RPA tools to automatically extract information from emailed PDFs to get them into the system. Yes, it's ERP to PDF and back to ERP using NLP and automation. Such as it is.
- v-erne 4y ago
  I hear You - I took part in many projects where the most important part was OCR for invoices. I have even seen a inner process in some local bank where they were OCR'ing their own documents that were printed first by other part's of this bank. But here in Poland the government apparently found a solution to this problem - it's called KSeF and it will force all local entities to send invoices as XML through their portal first (there will be no other legal way to invoice, because the KSeF number which is generated by the portal, is required for every legal invoice, without they won't be able to deduct VAT). Only time will tell if this will bring new era of electronic invoicing or just another failed government project.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Interestingly, the Hebrew word for money is "Kesef". Coincidence? Probably. As for whether or not it will work, I think as long as Polish companies need to invoice non-Polish companies and vice-versa, trying to standardize in this manner will be challenging.

tomkaos 4y ago

My biggest frustration as a small business. Each month you need to deep dive in website of every service you use to find your invoice. Big company like Facebook and Google need 20 click to find your invoice. No way to automate this. I dream about a standard or a service that just collect all invoice on your google drive/dropbox.