Interoperability of e-Invoicing
User Guide / e-Invoicing în Europe / Interoperability of e-InvoicingThe eInvoicing Directive states interoperability as a key objective in its notes. The benefits of interoperability are identified to be in terms of savings, environmental impact, and reduction of administrative burdens (note 6).
In addition to the importance of legal certainty the Directive identifies the three distinct levels required for full interoperability to be (note 8):
- The content of an invoice (semantics), addressed by the semantic invoice data model in part 1 of the European standard on eInvoicing.
- The format or language used (syntax), addressed by the syntax binding methodology and binding to selected syntax in part 3 of the European standard on eInvoicing
- The method of transmission, addressed by the guideline on transmission, addressed in part 4 of the European standard on eInvoicing.
This contributes to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) that has been adopted by the European Commission to give specific guidance on how to setup interoperable digital public services.
"For the purpose of the EIF, interoperability is the ability of organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge between these organisations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their ICT systems."
EIF defines four layers of interoperability which can be described as follows in the context of eInvoicing.
| Legal |
Legal interoperability concerns that electronic invoices can be exchanged and accepted within Member States and across borders as legal documents that provide for the business claim and fulfils regulatory requirements on accounting. The EU has facilitated this with the 2010/45 amendment to the VAT Directive and with the eInvoicing directive 2014/55. |
| Organisational |
These are the internal work processes of the seller and the receiver. The eInvoicing standard does not attempt to standardise internal business processes but by defining a data model that contains a specific set of data it aims to support the most common processes and recognises that sector specific processes may need to be supported with extensions. |
| Semantic |
Semantic interoperability ensures that the precise format and meaning of exchanged data and information is preserved and understood throughout exchanges between parties, in other words ‘what is sent is what is understood’. In the EIF, semantic interoperability covers both semantic and syntactic aspects. Both are addressed by the eInvoicing standard. |
| Technical |
In EIF this is defined to cover the applications and infrastructures linking systems and services. Aspects of technical interoperability include interface specifications, interconnection services, data integration services, data presentation and exchange, and secure communication protocols. The eInvoicing standard addresses the interconnection services, exchange and communication protocols with a guideline on Message transport. Specification of interfaces to the systems is not addresses directly by the eInvoicing standard but by providing a standardised semantic data model and syntax binding the eInvoicing standard facilitates the development of interface modules that can be reused in multiple implementations. |