Adoption of electronic payments could substantially increase if accompanied by the automation of related processes such as invoicing. The Business Payments Coalition’s (BPC) (Off-site) e-Invoice interoperability framework initiative paves the way for digital transformation in business-to-business (B2B) transaction efficiency. On November 1, the BPC published two of three e-Invoicing reports to continue dialogue within the industry and help address barriers to increase corporate B2B payments efficiency. These reports will provide you with the background and methodology on why e-Invoicing is a necessary first step to achieving straight-through processing for B2B payment transactions.
- Overview of an e-Invoice Interoperability Framework (Off-site) – Introduces the concept of an e-Invoice interoperability framework, market challenges and benefits of addressing them and a path forward for the BPC work assessing U.S. market needs
- e-Invoice Interoperability Framework: e-Delivery Network Feasibility Assessment (Off-site) – Provides business and technology stakeholders with an understanding of the high-level requirements and standards required to establish an open, federated network of access points for the U.S. market
- e-Invoice Interoperability Framework: Semantic Model Assessment – Published by year-end following the BPC e-Invoice work group’s continued collaboration with the industry
What is an e-Invoice interoperability framework?
An e-Invoice interoperability framework is a set of policies, standards and guidelines that enable the exchange of e-Invoices, documents and messages independent of the payment, accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. An e-Invoice interoperability framework positions businesses to leverage electronic delivery and data standards to send and receive e-Invoices, reducing the cost and complexity to integrate into their back office systems.
Progress toward an e-Invoice interoperability framework
Payments efficiency promotes greater adoption of electronic invoices, payments and remittance data, which helps achieve straight-through processing. It reduces processing costs and the average end-to-end (societal) costs of payment transactions and enables innovative payment services that deliver improved value to businesses.
The United States is making progress toward an e-Invoice interoperability framework by leveraging the learnings and implementation strategies from frameworks that exist in other countries. The United States can create an interoperable ecosystem of access points, enabling service providers and accounting technology systems to provide sellers and buyers a service to connect once and seamlessly exchange electronic invoices with anyone across the open, federated network. An e-Invoice interoperability framework also creates a scalable ecosystem that simplifies and reduces the costs of exchanging e-Invoices between disparate systems. This will enable broader connectivity for e-Invoice exchanges and adoption.
Join the BPC today
The BPC is an internationally recognized organization with over 650 volunteer members working together to promote greater adoption of electronic B2B payments, remittance data and invoices to help enable innovative payment services across the payments industry. If you’d like to be part of making B2B electronic payments more efficient from end to end, visit the BPC website, BusinessPaymentsCoalition.org (Off-site), to learn more. Be a part of the change by joining the BPC (Off-site)!
