What is this standard about?
This is part of a European series to establish the essential information elements needed for an electronic invoice. This ensures legal (including fiscal) compliance and enables interoperability for cross-border, cross-sector and domestic trade. This second part specifies the syntaxes.
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 series of European standards establishes a semantic data model for the core elements of an electronic invoice and will help organizations in the private and the public sectors undertake public procurement invoicing. It may also be used for invoicing between private sector enterprises.
Part 2 is a technical document that specifies the syntaxes, which are technical machine-readable languages, in which the semantic model may be expressed. In submitting an electronic invoice compliant with BS EN 16931-1 to a public contracting authority that is obliged to receive and process it, the invoice has to be expressed in one of the specified syntaxes.