What is this standard about?
This standard is the fifth part of a European series establishing the essential information elements needed for an electronic invoice to ensure legal (including fiscal) compliance. It describes how trading partners may extend the core invoice model, and the related business rules and code lists, to support business cases that are specific to their trading environment, while at the same time maintaining semantic interoperability with the core invoice model.
Who is this standard for?
- Finance and IT departments in the private and public sector
- Procurement industry
- Legal and compliance industry
- Trade officials
Why should you use this standard?
The adoption of e-invoicing is bringing significant economic benefits. According to The European Commission the move from paper to e-invoices is expected to generate savings of €240bn over a six-year period and will become the predominant method of invoicing in Europe by 2020.
This standard provides guidelines on the core invoice models and considers specific environments for dealing with cross-border, cross-sector and domestic trade.
NOTE: This document does not cover the creation of core invoice usage specifications, which are established in EN 16931-1, nor does it set out the detailed process of syntax binding for extensions.